In the Film Festivals it is inevitable that everything is magnified and created about opinion about films that will not necessarily correspond to what the public who sees them outside that context thinks. San Sebastián, unlike the three main class A festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin), does not most house world premieres, so some of those films that came with the enthusiasm of critics from other festivals fail to conquer in the same way the audience of the Basque contest. It is a matter of expectations. In this article we commented those films we expected more, whether it was for the name of its director or for the conversation that had been created around them.
‘Die My Love’ (projection of the Donostia Award)
Lynne Ramsay is an author who does not lavish too much, but when he does, she usually awakens passions and hatreds equally, especially since her previous work, her first in the United States, ‘Actually, you were never here.’ In ‘Die My Love’ he returns to work with Hollywood stars adapting the first novel by Argentina Ariana Harwicz, and divides criticism with her. Grace (Jennifer Lawrence, Donostia Award in this edition) is a woman who lives in a rural area with her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson). Both are very in love and are happy to start a new stage. However, the arrival of its firstborn causes in it a radical mood change.
Ramsay explores postpartum depression and how a child alters the dynamics of an existing couple, leaving aside intimacy and sexual desire to prioritize the needs of the newborn. To do this, Scottish director uses a strident and deranged language, with a staging that abuses sound blows, introducing sequences with very high music to reflect the tumultuous emotional state of the protagonist. Lawrence is thrown into the void without a network in an excellent and daring interpretation, but there is nothing in ‘Die My Love’ that makes us understand the complex psychology of his character. Ramsay does not seem too worried about it, but rather to build an extreme experience as unpleasant as uninteresting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z5GNDDSS4
Damn luck (official section)
Edward Berger returned to the official section of the San Sebastián Festival after competing last year with ‘Conclave’, winner of the best script award adapted in the Oscars, where he opted for 8 awards. With ‘Damn luck’ it does not seem to follow the same path, since it is a movie very close to the disaster. Based on Lawrence Osborne’s novel and Rowan Joffe script, the plot follows Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell), a professional ludopath and scammer who lives in Macao Yendo de Casino in Casino. Their debts do not stop increasing until he receives an unexpected offer of the beautiful and mysterious Dao Ming (Fala Cheng), willing to help him.
Doyle begins a psychological journey where reality and paranoia intermingle between casinos, alcohol and the exotic landscapes of the picturesque Chinese city. Farrell strives to give his character of histrionism that seems to ask for history, but it does not have much to grab since we never really know who he is. Berger’s tone is always so up, so past thread, that instead of getting into the plot, he expels you. There is nothing far beyond his premise and his striking aesthetics of bright colors and neon lights. When the end comes, one cannot avoid breathing with relief: finally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heybTOVHJV0
Hind’s voice (pearls)
When Jim Jarmusch won the Golden Lion in Venice instead of ‘The voice of Hind’, the new Tunisian film Kaouther Ben Hania about the real case of Hind Rajab, a Palestinian girl who was killed by the Israeli army, many criticisms were made to the jury for not having given him the highest award (he “formed” with the Grand Prize) to the Grand Prize) The reality, on the other hand, is that despite the fact that the issue is very important, the film lacks the cinematographic value that one could expect given the great reception he had in the Italian event. His intention does not seem so much to be a film as to expose brutality and injustice to a genocide that is happening before our eyes.
To do this, Ben Hania uses the real phone calls that the girl maintained with the red crescent team (the Middle East Red Cross), but dramatizing the part of the professionals who talked to her. Here the first moral doubt arises in a tape whose cinematographic resources are very limited and seems shot in a hurry: to what extent is it ethical to bring to light the last life of that poor girl to create a tension film? Is fiction the best method to tell this story? There is no clear answer to these questions, but as a spectator it is inevitable to question if with the intention of denouncing something so serious, it is not falling into trivialization and insensitivity. The filmmaker also mixes file videos with the story fictional from the Red Crescent Operations Center. At the visual level it is so poor and flat that it is difficult to get involved in its narrative until almost the end, and when one does it is not the merit of the filmmaker, but of its use of absolutely devastating recordings.
Be that as it may, if this film serves in some way to convince someone not convinced that what Israel is committing is a full -fledged genocide against the Palestinians and that it is intolerable that the powerful do nothing to stop it, everything said so far would completely lose their meaning. I hope it’s like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_rc04CzPay
Stories of the Good Valley (Official Section)
The expectation before José Luis Guerín’s new film was Máxima. Ten years after his last feature film ‘The Academy of the Muses’, the prestigious Spanish filmmaker premiered worldwide in San Sebastián his documentary ‘Stories of the Good Valley’. The film is located in Vallbona, a small municipality on the periphery of Barcelona that, due to its different urban changes, remains practically isolated between a highway, the river and the train tracks. Its inhabitants are happy and tremendously proud of their land, a place that despite being just half an hour from the Catalan capital, retains mostly rural ways of life.
Guerín observes the people of the town with sensitivity and humanity, showing their personal and community concerns with humor and tenderness. However, there is something that unfortunately cannot escape: from an idealized look and somewhat condescending to the population of a labor neighborhood that, surely, is far from that almost idyllic place that insists on portraying. The filmmaker portrays the different inhabitants in their day to day, filming their conversations and thus building a multicultural radiography of the town. However, although in his first minutes he has a certain charm, Guerín imposes at all times in his film a feeling of importance that simply does not have. Their two hours of footage are more than excessive: by half, everything that had to be said, but instead of ending, is scheduled to turn over itself until the exasperation in search of a hollow poetry has already been said.
Private life (pearls)
The new film by French director Rebecca Zlotowski presents a great claim: Jodie Foster as the protagonist on a fully French role. The legendary actress plays the psychiatrist Lillian Steiner, who has just lost a patient due to suicide. However, after going to the wake and seeing how the husband of the deceased the fault of having prescribed the pills his wife used to take his life, he realizes that there is something strange in all this. The more he investigates, the more he becomes obsessed that it is a murder.
The tone that Zlotowski uses is a bit of the style of ‘mysterious murder in Manhattan’ or other comedies with crimes from through the New York author. However, if something shows us this film is that what Woody Allen does is not easy. The filmmaker at any time achieves charm, spark and Allenian grace or the ability to intrigue another of her great references, Hitchcock. The script is full of narrative clumsiness, especially when we approach an end with a strangely serious tone that does not match the previous light. And the characters, both the protagonist and those around her, are flat and little convincing. The result is a very smaller, very French and very insubstantial film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3rszfzicho
