The Barcelona filmmaker returns to the San Sebastian festival with a less than intrepid film starring a stupendous Anna Castillo
Jaime Rosales competed for the first time for the Golden Shell with ‘headshot’ (2008) and now he does it again with ‘Wild Sunflowers’, and the distance between the two films is much larger than 14 years. These are, it is true, two fictions intimately connected with the society of their time, but in very different ways. One was an aggressively ‘arty’ reflection on terrorism due to its formal and narrative aridity, pure risk conceived to generate debate and confrontation, and partly for this reason it continues to be one of the great artistic achievements of the Barcelona artist; the other, presented today in San Sebastian, is one of his most conservative and simple works at a conceptual level, less intrepid and precise when dealing with its object of study and, therefore, more debatable.
Starring a stupendous Anna Castillo, the film offers a three-stage portrait of a mother of two children exposed to as many problematic sentimental relationships: the first is lived together by an unemployed man with a body full of tattoos, who accumulates debts and more than evident aggressiveness problems since he enters the scene; the second, with a military stationed in Melilla who is the real father of the little ones but who refuses to take care of them other than by sending them money; the third, with a better educated guy with a better economic situation, who wants to have a family but is not prepared to make the sacrifices that this requires.
In other words, ‘Wild Sunflowers’ offers a brief catalog of various forms of toxic masculinity. And the most immediate problem that he exhibits in the process is that his male characters almost never become more than mere representations of that catalog -and in the case of some of them, inexplicably exaggerated-; and while exposing them the film shows a clear lack of conviction about your purpose, so it ends up suggesting meanings that Rosales surely did not intend, with good reason. One? That some women have a special tendency to choose the wrong man. Other? That all men are toxic, but those belonging to the lumpen are more so than those from a good family.
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Also presented today in competition, ‘El suplente’ proposes a reflection on the social tensions faced by many students and teachers in conflict zones, and he does it through the portrait of an Argentine middle-class intellectual whose existence changes completely when he enters as a substitute teacher at a school located in a poor neighborhood devastated by drugs, and who, in order to straighten the course of his students, will be forced to do intense overtime. Director Diego Lerman stops short of exploring the thorny ethical questions his premise suggests, and his forays into thriller territory are somewhat lukewarm; In any case, unlike all those films about a wealthy teacher who ends up in a classroom full of kids with a dirty life and changes their lives overnight in an artificial, condescending and maudlin way, ‘El suplente’ is a dramatically restrained and generally believable film, much closer to ‘The Class’ (2008) than ‘Dangerous Minds’ (1995).
As for the third contender for the Golden Shell presented today, ‘Runner’ manages to get great dramatic power from a rigorous narrative minimalism. Set deep in America in a rather indefinite period of time, Marian Mathias’ debut feature follows a girl forced to travel miles to bury the body of her suddenly deceased father, and over whose cloudy vital horizon the sun seems to penetrate as soon as she meets a similarly lost youth; meanwhile, he extracts all the expressive possibilities from a landscape made up of wind, rain and mud, and from a succession of incidents and conversations only seemingly insignificant. It lasts 76 minutes, and the expressive profitability that it extracts in its course is almost miraculous.