The wonderful The Virgin of August (2019), made Jonás Trueba a recognized director in France. This recognition has gone one step further with the participation of the Spanish director in the prestigious Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Festival with his latest film, You will returna moving, happy and sad comedy, which is perhaps the best work of his entire career.
The story is, as always in their filmography, apparently simple: a couple decides to separate and to convince themselves that they are “very well” and that “nothing is happening here” they venture to celebrate with a farewell party or welcome, depending on how you look at it. The idea of celebrating the end of love is an old one boutade about her father, one of those things said just because, because they sound good, and that now, stubbornly, his daughter and son-in-law pick up. So, while they dismantle their life for the last 14 years, they begin to organize their last party.
Written by Jonás Trueba and by the couple of performers, Itsaso Arana and Vito Sanz, You will return He reserves the role of father (father of the idea of the party and father of the bride) to the director’s own father, the filmmaker Fernando Trueba, whose son pays him an emotional and unforgettable tribute. The presence of Trueba Sr. is not limited to that of a man with a dressing gown and more or less ingenious dialogues; His character is key in a profound way. For what he says, for what he remains silent, and for that list of books that he recommends to his daughter to express to her what she doesn’t dare, or doesn’t quite know how to say. This way of letting important things fall without imposing them is a way of educating made with the same respect and delicacy with which Jonás Trueba observes with his camera the face of the man who introduced him to books, music and that cinephilia without which he could not do. You would understand the look of this man from Madrid who, at 42 years old, is a comforting island within the panorama of current Spanish cinema.
You will return He doesn’t force his charm, he doesn’t need it: he lets it happen thanks to the complicity of a team that conceives cinema as an act of collective creation, old fashioned. troupe. A tribe of friends in a very specific place, Madrid, a city that, as in The Virgin of August you breathe everywhere. Jonás Trueba practices the cinema of a solitary walker in his own city, the real Madrid, the same as always. That of the Rastro and the Viaduct, but without any cliché, intimate, still unrelated to gentrification, like the door of that house that will no longer be the house where one day two people were happy.
Trueba’s new film is due to his style, but more mature and without losing its freshness. He drinks from life and cinema, interchangeable, and his cinephile saints -François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Philippe Garrel or Hong Sang-soo – could be added this time to Woody Allen and other classics of American comedy in his melancholic portrait of a couple that one day decides to say goodbye and start over.
The other Spanish film participating in the festival, this time within Critics’ Weekis The brides of the southa medium-length documentary by Elena López Riera, who two years ago already participated with Watera feature film that in many ways connects with his new work. The brides of the south He also talks about women, their wedding nights, their first sexual relations and the occasional love. Her characters are mothers and grandmothers from another era. Riera offers a collage of testimonies and domestic documents—photographs, Super 8 films—around white dresses, bouquets, church bells and sepia-colored brides. The voice in off of the director guides us—sometimes excessively—through a series of stories from the past: “I ask others the questions that I dare not ask my mother,” says Riera.
Those women who are not his mother tell him what it was like to lose their virginity, what it was like to be married to a man they never wanted, how they learned to enjoy their body or how, over time, they have given up sex. The brides of the South ends up being the confession of a secret fear, that of seeing herself in a mirror that reflects the traces of her own genetics, that of a silent inheritance that Riera faces by searching for the words and gestures of others.
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