“In love we all need to learn”

This is what the director himself said this Saturday during the presentation of the film in Donostia the genesis of the project was his interest in exploring three types of masculinity: that of “primitive, more caveman” man; that of the more intermediate second, “who takes no responsibilities”; and that of the latter, “more feminized and modern.” To achieve this, Rosales places a young mother at the center of this triangle, who only needs to learn what love is. “We all need to learn. We sample people who are different and draw conclusions”assured.

For the director from Barcelona, ​​whose latest works were seen in parallel sections of the festival but did not choose the Golden Shell, what makes a film truly beautiful is “that the viewer recognizes something in it from his own biography”. Something he is convinced will happen to his in which he tracks naturalistic film with the successes and mistakes that every woman can have in choosing a partner throughout her life.

In this case, he chooses a young mother of two, Julia, played by Ana Castillowho begins a relationship with Oscar, a textbook badass whom he revives and molds into an excellent one Oriol Pla. The bucolic dream into which the protagonist seems to gravitate is shattered when the bandit crosses the border and physically attacks her. Then Rosales takes certainly the bravest decision in the film by not falling victim and take the character to the usual point of forgiveness and back to the starting point that feature films of this type are all too accustomed to. This time she acts, grabs the bags and leaves.

“Julia is a very strong person. At each hit, look for a new solutionthough this, like going to Melilla, may be a mistake. He is an intelligent character who learns“, pointed out the director, with whom he also co-authored the script Barbara Diess. In the aforementioned Melilla, the protagonist continues his journey and returns to the house of the father of his children, a man played by Quim Avila, who constantly doubts whether he can be a good parent. This is also not what she needs in her life, so she returns to Barcelona, ​​where the first arc of the film takes place, where she finds the third typology of masculinity to analyze, the one with the face of Luis Marquez.

own technique

During the casting call for the film, Rosales explained that lately he always works the same way. first, choose an actor to base the rest of the cast onwhich in this case is Oriol Pla, with whom the director has already worked Petra. Once selected, he discovers the remaining translators based on a rehearsal.

“Jaime has a very personal workflow. First you do the scene with the script, then you improvise it, and finally you go back to the text. In this way, there is always a limit to what can happen,” revealed Castillo. This freedom led to the “moment of greatest tension” ever experienced on film. It happened during the rehearsal of the meeting of the characters played by Pla and Marquez, when the former broke a table and became violent, which made the whole team afraid. “He is a director who works from the character to the actor, not the other way around. It leaves you with no text tools and knows how to tension everything very well. Normally he doesn’t want us to build anything up front, but for this character he did. It was a slow job that caused us a lot of anxiety,” admitted Pla.

This formula makes Castillo better understand her character, a “very struggling” mother trying to survive in a “patriarchal system with very toxic masculinity.” “Now I can finally understand feminist motherhood, but that’s not really how we grew up”It’s over.