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Illness and Empathy: San Sebastian Film Festival 2024
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in The Room Next Door If San Sebastian Film Festival director José Luis Rebordinos ever wanted to choose a poster child for how the new voices of today can become the established veterans of tomorrow, he could do a lot worse than Pedro Almodóvar, whose debut Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom played at the festival back in 1980. At this year’s 72nd edition, during which Almodóvar turned 75, he was back in the northern Spanish coastal city to receive a lifetime Donostia Award and show his latest film, The Room Next Door. At the award ceremony, Almodóvar was given the prize by Tilda Swinton, who stars in his latest, and indicated he has no intention of slowing down: “At my age, a prize like Donostia can indicate the end of a road and a reward for having traveled it. But I don’t live it like that. For me, cinema is a blessing or a curse. I can’t think of any other way of life if it’s not writing or directing.”
Nevertheless, his latest film does consider the end of the road we all reach eventually. Swinton and Julianne Moore star as old friends Martha and Ingrid, who reconnect after Ingrid learns that Martha is terminally ill. It marks the first English-language feature for Almodóvar, which does take its toll on dialogue that feels rather stilted to begin with. However, once it settles into what is essentially a two-hander—with some grace note scenes involving John Turturro as another old friend—the actresses find an engaging rhythm. Visually, it is never less than a treat, taking its lead from Edward Hopper paintings, specifically “People In The Sun,” while the framing and use of color emphasize the way that solitude and companionship can sometimes go hand in hand.
Dealing compassionately with terminal illness was the crux of several other films. In the competition section, those included the delicately-worked Spanish drama Glimmers, for which star Patricia López Arnaiz won the festival’s gender neutral Silver Shell acting prize. She plays Isabel, a woman who finds herself back in the life of her ex-husband Ramón (Antonio de la Torre, as good as always in an unusually small role) as he nears death after her daughter Madalen (Marina Guerola) turns to her for help. Director Pilar Palomero, co-writing with Eider Rodriguez, follows up on her subtle exploration of teenage pregnancy, Motherhood, with an equally nuanced drama that charts the ins and outs of familial relationships, including Isabel’s with a new partner (Julián López), without sentimentality or melodrama. This textured film takes its cue from the soft light that dapples many of its scenes, celebrating empathy and the small moments that make life worth living even if you’re soon to leave it.
Also casting an unsentimental eye over terminal illness and featuring a younger person trying to come to terms with the impending death of a parent was Danish drama My Eternal Summer, which played in the New Directors section. Debut director Sylvia La Fanu draws on her own experience of losing her mother when she was young. Impressive newcomer Kaya Toft Loholt stars as Fanny, a spiky 15-year-old who is finding the last summer with her mum (Maria Rossing) hard to face. La Fanu captures the way that teenage life and the emotions that go with it don’t just stop for Fanny because her mother is sick. It also features a warm supporting turn from Anders Mossling as Fanny’s father, who is trying to square the circle between the two women in his life. Like Glimmers, the drama is built around the subtle cues that family members give one another and sees British-born, Copenhagen-based director La Fanu take a robust approach to illness. Many films with dying characters employ them as a plot device, or even little more than set dressing, but Rossing’s mother is shown to be keen to be as active as she can, both physically and in terms of navigating family relationships, to the last. “I just remember my own mother, in glimpses, being full of life, and being brave and strong,” Le Fanu told me. “I thought that’s so important to have that nuance.”
“Full of life” is a phrase that could certainly be applied to the shrewd old bird at the heart of French filmmaker François Ozon’s When Fall Is Coming, which had its world premiere in San Sebastian and walked off with the jury prize for best screenplay (written by Ozon and Philippe Piazzo) as well as the gender-neutral Silver Shell for best supporting performance for Pierre Lottin. In a playful drama where nothing is quite as mellow as it first appears, Hélène Vincent stars as Michelle, an elderly woman in the inquisitive Miss Marple vein enjoying the comfortable autumn of her years in the wooded French countryside, where she regularly chews the fat with her old friend Marie-Claude (Josian Bolasko). The subject of conversation is often their children, since Marie-Claude’s son (Lottin) is nearing the end of a stretch in jail, while Michele’s daughter (Ludivine Sagnier) has long-standing friction with her mother that is about to be tipped over the edge by an unfortunate incident when she and Michele’s grandson (Garlan Erlos) pay a visit.
Ozon, whose casual placement of a Ruth Rendell book is surely no accident, never plays quite by the rules. Here, he repeatedly turns expectations on their head, injecting the drama with comedy and thriller elements while probing at ideas of redemption and guilt. The insertion of a spot of the supernatural is a little surplus to requirements, but it’s hard not to admire Ozon’s devil-may-care approach to upending expectations. When it comes to relationships, he suggests, you never know when something you think is sweet might turn out to be toxic. Although it was Lottin who took home an acting award—and he brings a surprising amount of ambivalence to what appears at first to be a straightforward character—it could easily have gone to any of the ensemble cast.
Strong performances were a mark of this year’s festival in general, including Joana Santos’s in On Falling, a distilled and magnetic portrayal of a Portuguese migrant working as a picker in a massive fulfillment warehouse in Scotland that should help her catch the eye of more casting directors. The film is the feature debut of Scottish-based Portuguese director Laura Carreira, who won, in ex aequo, sharing the Silver Shell for best director with Pedro Martín-Calero for The Wailing. Carreira’s film shows a strong command of framing and character development as we follow the lonely life of Santos’s Aurora over the course of a handful of days. Her workday accompaniment is the bleep of the scanner she uses to pick up stock as she moves through the warehouse. Interactions with fellow workers are few and far between, and we see that she finds connections hard back at the house she shares with a group of others in similar gig economy jobs. This is social realism in the Ken Loach mode co-produced by his company Sixteen Films, although it never feels as stodgy and message-driven as his films have become lately. Carreira crafts her character study in a detailed fashion, steering away from suggesting everyone who has this sort of job is as lonely as Aurora while still articulating how close to the edge it can put you financially and emotionally. The director transports us fully into Aurora’s headspace as we see the things that hold her focus—a packet of crisps, the unexpected touch from another person—urging us to pay more attention to these invisible workers who do our bidding whether they are on or off the clock.
If Carreira’s film is all about control, Martín-Calero’s is marked by ambition. A horror film that unfolds across multiple time periods in three parts, The Wailing is undone somewhat by a rather schematic climax and overly abrupt ending. Incorporating elements of Shutter (2004), It Follows (2014) and many a J-horror, it sees a woman, Andrea (Ester Expósito), being terrorized by a man that she can only see in playback on her phone camera or video calls in unnerving and creepy early scenes. The action then spins back two decades to chart two more women’s experiences with the invisible stalker, this time caught on video camera. While all the performances are good, Malena Villa is the stand-out, both her look and acting style recalling that of Kristen Stewart, which should certainly do her career no harm going forward. For the most part, Martín-Calero knows how to ratchet up the tension, while also asking relevant questions about the way women’s reports of abuse are often ignored or dismissed and the way that violence can leak down from one generation to the next.
In typical fashion, I managed to miss both the New Director winner, Swiss film Bagger Drama, directed by Piet Baumgartner, and the Golden Shell best film winner, Afternoons of Solitude, a bullfighting documentary by Albert Serra—the second Spanish film in two years to take the top award. So, perhaps the last words should go to Almodóvar, who is definitely on to something when he says: “This edition of the festival could go down in history as the one in which the value of empathy was defended many times and in a sincere way.”
