‘The girls are fine’: beauty, lightness and pretentiousness in the construction of art | Culture

The cinematographic references of the habitual actress Itsaso Arana for her debut as a feature film director are palpable: the simplicity, tone and summer spaces of Éric Rohmer; the nature of creation, interpretive relationships and questions about the power of Jacques Rivette’s panels Paris belongs to us; the graceful and apparently inconsequential spirit of Jean Renoir’s picnics; life within the theater and the theater within the life of Louis Malle of Vania on 42nd Street; and, of course, a part of the style closest to the documentary of the cinema of Jonás Trueba, of which she herself has been an interpreter in films such as The Virgin of August and You have to come see it.

Nevertheless, The girls are fine, Set in a rural house during the country days of a theater company that rehearses a play from the 17th century, made up of a playwright and four actresses, it ends up linked to a style from further back, from much further back: that of the 16th century pastoral novel. and XVII, whose essential characteristics it fulfills almost to the letter—romance, psychological simplification, bucolic atmosphere, verbal style with certain pretensions, presence of princes and princesses, and even a frog or, in this case, a toad. With one more addition: autofiction and metalanguage are played, since the five main characters respond to their own names in real life, the playwright is the director of the film, and two of the performers are more than consecrated in their craft and they are “admired” by the two young women who are starting out, and there also coincide the professional moments of Bárbara Lennie and Irene Escolar, stars of the stage, alongside Itziar Manero and Helena Ezquerro.

The whole thus acquires an admirable singularity that, however, is more beautiful to see than to hear. The film has a tone of inconsequentiality and a clear color that, accompanied by female complicity, leads it to catch the eye very well. How each of the issues are raised is a different matter. In history, major or especially complex issues are addressed with a language that is not sure whether it wants to be naturalist from the 21st century or Renaissance from the 16th: prejudices regarding the physical archetypes of each of them; death and its interpretation in art; the dichotomy between earthly love and theatrical romance; the nature of desire, so often unconscious; motherhood, its certainties, its doubts and its fears. You go through all of them, but you miss a depth that is barely touched upon in the hour and twenty minutes of footage.

At times, the film is fresh, graceful, friendly. In others, it is difficult to enter into their love dynamic (not the one within the play they are rehearsing, but that of the film outside), with long or very long thirty-year-olds speaking and acting like fifteen-year-olds with pedantic nuances: “I like you as an idea.” “I like you as a unit,” one of them says to the man she likes, and with whom she has never been together, in an audio of WhatsApp.

Premiered at the Karlovy Vary festival, The girls are fine It is supported by a beautiful formal gear, with music by Bach, interludes with fabric engravings wow, and sincere and knowing smiles. It’s playful, original. But, also, mellifluous and with a short flight. In Arana there are enough ideas around the construction of art to continue working hard on them, but here his beautiful images are not combined with a background that transcends, excites or reflects beyond their lightness.