Mario Benedetti’s low-key “long love” unfolds on the big screen

Alexander Prieto

Montevideo, September 13 (EFE).- Lifting the veil of oblivion by placing one by one like pieces of a puzzle the memories of a predestined meeting: this is the premise of the documentary that brings to the big screen the “long love” between the famous Mario Benedetti and his “accomplice and all” Luz Lopez.

Although today little remains to be known about the Uruguayan author who, with a huge work that has sold more than three million copies and been translated into more than 20 languages, has become an essential part of universal literature, he still persists without revealing an aspect , which, reserved for the closest circle, remained away from public attention: that of “his Light”.

This is that, as the director of the film “Benedetti, 60 years with Luz” Andrés Varela emphasizes in an interview with the EFE agency, it was during an investigation for the writer’s centenary in 2020 that the team of the production company Coral Films gave a character “absolutely unknown , but so important to his life,” as was Luz Lopez, his wife.

FUTURE AND REEFS

“When I met her/she was only twelve years old and had black braids/and a stupid dog that served as our doormat/I was fourteen and I wasn’t even a dog,” Benedetti says in the 1976 Bodas de Perlas, a poem , in which, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the relationship, breaks down what it was like to meet the love of your life.

There, he also says the phrase that opens the trailer for the documentary, in which, Varela says, the author himself is often responsible for telling the story with his poems dedicated to Luz: “I calculated in my mind the future and the riffs/and I knew that I was predestined/or rather I was predestined/still don’t know the difference’.

So, says the director, in the film, which will premiere this Wednesday – the author’s birthday – the figure of a low-profile woman who has “a very deep education in art” motivated by her parents, but he comes from a family with right-wing politics a tradition far removed from the left-wing militancy that characterized Benedetti.

For Varela, this is one of the biggest discoveries the investigation has made because, he notes, Benedetti’s relationship with his in-laws has not been severed despite these differences.

“One would never have guessed that one of the people Mario loved the most was Luz’s first cousin, who was a colonel in the army, and we discovered that this man often helped him leave the country when he was in the -big danger,” he explains.

THE ETERNAL PUZZLE

As Varela explains, one of the challenges of the film, which tries to “reconstruct” the “very deep” love relationship that passed through the life of the creator of “La Tregua” or “Gracias por el fuego”, was to put together this “puzzle timeless “, as most of the images are from the archive and combining them was “a very difficult equation”.

“We have pictures of her from when she was a girl to her last days, and we capture it all in one moment like it’s a storybook,” she points out, adding that they are supplemented with some “wedges” or reproductions of key moments in history, such as the first asthma attack that left the Uruguayan on the brink of death.

“We tried to tap into that ability that Mario had to go to the simple, to say the right thing. That was also like a slogan that it should be simple, and based on that we were putting together this puzzle with all those pieces,” he notes.

To which he specifies that although there are interviews with family and friends, such as the Spanish composer Juan Manuel Serrat or the Argentine Nacha Guevara, they are sought to be in an “off” format rather than on camera, Varela also emphasizes the role of music plays in the movie.

“There are two musical themes (written by Benedetti), but then the entire soundtrack was composed specifically for the film,” he points out of the film, which does not lack Guevara’s voice singing the romantic “if I love you, it’s because you’re / mine love, my accomplice and all’.

BUT IF AN AFTERNOON IS LOST

A turning point in the relationship between Benedetti and López, who accompanied the author in his various exiles – first in Cuba, then in Spain – was, says Varela, the impact caused by the sudden onset of Alzheimer’s disease, which affected her in old age. and which deeply affects the author.

“It’s like a terrible dagger, it’s almost a Greek tragedy, and it’s completely unknown in Mario’s life. Three years later, he dies in a state of loneliness and pain, so it’s very interesting in contrast to this good-natured, likable author,” the outsider points out.

“The person he decided to spend his whole life with, the love of his life, forgets him,” adds the director, and says that recreating that first night when he didn’t find her by his side because he wandered off very confused work special two hands with the operator, César Charlon.

“But if one afternoon you lose yourself/Between the sea and the mirror/Always remember that here we are/I, my soul and my body,” ends Benedetti’s Sonata for Farewell and Flute, and it is this and other passages, like this one, which remembers that “long love has no splits”, which will also play with the emotions of those who, once in the cinemas, glance at the 60s a love written in verse. EFE

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