Original title: The girls · Pilar Palomero · Spain · 2020 · Script: Pilar Palomero · Interpreters: Andrea Fandos, Natalia de Molina, Carlota Gurpegui…
Among the many defects that national auteur cinema has (not all national auteur cinema, of course) a recurring resource is found, already become a brand, to a cloying Manichaeism when it comes to addressing certain social issues or facing the review of our reality, whether present or past. A Manichaeism that invests certain proposals with an aura of ethical or political commitment, but that display a dubious rigor and, above all, of an even more dubious effectiveness as a purported analysis of those realities that it aspires to portray.. I must be a weirdo, but I was never interested in certain stories, like those of those unemployed who did not care too much about being unemployed. Mondays in the sun, by Fernando León de Aranoa, to give an example. or the drawing, even more syrupy and more discursive than realistic prostitution tapes like Flowers from another world, by Icíar Bollaín. O, already on the historical level, If we take recent examples like the proposal, almost cartoonish, by Alejandro Amenábar in While the war lasts. A dinner, in many cases, more aware of adjusting to fiction, used as mere ornament, a previously assembled speech that investigates that reality, always more diffuse, elusive, subtle, contradictory and complex. Definitely, more real. This new list is joined by, for those who subscribe, The girls, first work by director Pilar Palomero.
Wanting to build a portrait of a certain sociological context, will always leave out many issues to attend to. But what I think is not acceptable is taking a part of that reality, isolate it, turn it around at convenience and then present it as if it were the whole. and this is, basically, what I think we find in this production. It is now convenient to place the events narrated in this film in time so that they can be understood., not just the story itself, but the core of what I am trying to explain. Thus, and although, as we will see, at times it doesn't seem like it to us, we stand, at least, In the year 1992. Already released this last decade of the 20th century, a girl, Clara, He goes to class at a Catholic high school attended only by girls.. Over there, in the classroom (and out of it), Clara will discover, through her relationship with her friends and their older sisters, his true identity, in addition to facing the challenges of that stage of life, to the discovery of his body, Sex, united with awakening to the outside world, to the popular culture of the moment, to the relationship with the boys, all this in opposition, as usually happens in any self-respecting initiation tape, to the disrupted order imposed by the adults around her.
Palomero's script suffers from a rigidity that, as a spectator, It feels like a shell and that it constricts the situations it poses., as well as hindering more solid development, organic and, above all, based on the evolution of their characters. The director from Zaragoza cares more about the speech than the story, what makes everything stay, in this way, artificially conditioned. In fact, we could say that The girls It is more a succession of pictures than a story in itself. In the sum of those scenes, The director hopes to expose her “message” or reflection. A prologue and an epilogue that revolve around a specific situation (which we will not describe to avoid the spoiler), They will give the appearance of coherence and continuity to the whole.
Go ahead and say that Palomero's commitment to this structure seems risky to me and demonstrates a lot of security and solvency in its efforts., especially if we take into account that we are talking about a first film. Believe, besides, what, in certain aspects, achieves long, with this strategy, what you intend. In the first place, we could say that The girls It is a story of improvement and maturity. This is abundantly clear to us.. After that succession of scenes, We know that the Clara in the last shot of the film is not the same as the one in the beginning. Something is not the same. at the beginning, She is an obedient girl who does not consider the rules of the world to which she belongs.. When the journey that the film proposes ends, Clara seems to already be questioning the entire network of duties and obligations to which she is subjected and, even, Both his look and certain gestures give us to understand that he has begun an attempt at rebellion.. However, It is in the way that Palomero articulates the internal mechanisms of that process where we find the greatest weaknesses of this work..
The basic text of The girls part from the particular to reach the general, in this case, a sketch of the generation that went through puberty at the beginning of the 1970s 90, of his intellectual education, sentimental, cultural and, especially, of his training regarding sex, central point of the film and which articulates what the director proposes as an oppressive order marked, above all, due to the influence of the Catholic religion. Palomero starts from an initial thesis: that education conditions, in the concrete, Clara's development, but, beyond, that of that entire generation to which he refers, which is yours. The problem is that, to prove it, It selects in such a way those key moments that articulate the speech that the hand of its maker cannot fail to be noticed to the point that the reactions of the characters do not fit both their characters and the message they want to convey to us.. Hence the rigidity of the text and, finally, of its translation to the screen. And it's a shame because (something rare in our cinema), Palomero has a group of child actresses who, despite the difficulties that it imposes on them, offer a wide range of possibilities. As we said, the discursive artifact prevails over that of fiction.
For Pilar Palomero, the generation of 90 It was strongly conditioned by the strong presence of that morality and influence of Catholic education., not only in the field of education, also in its social aspect. But, was it really like that? We talk about the years 90. Although for the older ones it probably hadn't been long., for those born during 70 y 80 The Spanish Transition was an event that was already distant and of which they would not have an intimate experience.. Since then, Spain had rushed into modernity, fact that was strongly reflected, especially, in popular culture to which, in a somewhat twisted way, as we will see, the movie refers, and from there to social uses and customs. It is difficult to exclude the presence of the Church from that equation, Of course, but what is not in doubt is that its cultural influence and, especially, in the moral, it had long since lost the strength it enjoyed in previous stages. Even for those who had studied in Catholic centers (and server had the “fortune” to pass by) its presence in everyday life and, therefore, in the character and formation as individuals of those generations was already more decorative than effective.. I repeat, we talk about the 90. Already before, in the 80, Too many things had happened and at an almost unexpected speed.
For Palomero to fit that portrait, he must separate the space that serves as a model for his exhibition., of the reality that, here, remains outside those classrooms and that social context that describes. First of all, say that the author falls into certain anachronisms that should be highlighted, not so much for pointing out errors, as if to show where we really stood. Palomero makes a curious concoction of cultural references. So, On the walls of the room of one of the protagonist girls you can see posters of a young Johnny Depp along with photographs of the eighties pop group Duran Duran. But well into the 1990s, the British group had already been (that are not few, aesthetically) who had changed their records, leaving aside their aura as a group of teenagers and bands like Nirvana, a year ago they had released their first album., Nevermind, significant fact of where the shots were going at that time. With that same descriptive sense, Palomero puts the poster of a well-known advertising campaign that encouraged the use of condoms on the bus stop bus stop approached by one of the nuns from Clara's institute., to account for the contrast and reinforce that idea of repression to which it refers. But that campaign took place two years earlier, which is no small thing. In the television advertisement that accompanied that campaign, a high school teacher, precisely (public, is assumed), He was trying to find out who owned a condom he had found. Faced with possible punishment and in response, stumbled upon the unanimous reaction of a classroom that, in solidarity, she completely presented herself as the owner of the accusatory condom. There are stories that come to draw a strong social reaction against that campaign, but, if I remember, I don't remember it and, rather the opposite, We looked at everything with frank indifference. Leaving aside this fact, It is advisable to distinguish the type of classroom that it portrays, in one's own time, he spots, and the rather moth-eaten sketch that the author wants to sneak in. Yeah, there were opposite reactions, but the majority of society, especially the young, I was more than prepared for that type of message.. We are talking about the Spain that the previous generation had already heard from groups like Mecano or Hombres G., but also to La Polla Records and many others that it is not relevant to list here. If we talk about social context, the Spain of the 90 I would begin to know what political corruption was. (war case, 1991) and the progressive dream of Felipe González's PSOE was beginning to fray. And if, as the film reviews, SOME (figure for me incomprehensibly vindicated in these times), It was already going strong at the El Templo de Cullera nightclub with songs of sad memories, but what matters now is to ask ourselves, Where was the influence of the Church on that youth who went to extremes? (of anything that could be taken) in the darkness of a beach disco? no idea. Even Clara herself, in a future not too distant from that of fiction, would most likely end, with her group of friends, in one of those centers of techno music, any day, at the first light of dawn, without knowing where it is, His head is about to explode after a whole night of moving from bar to bar and who knows what chemicals he put in his body.. I wonder what memory of the nuns' education would have remained in that case?.
Following a recent trend, Pilar Palomero shoots her film in square format, but although this resource is used by certain authors with the intention of restricting and directing the viewer's gaze (see the very intelligent game of Saul's son but László Nemes), Here it serves the director to create a barrier that isolates her characters and, with that, our memory, of the reality that was palpitating at the time compared to this other reality created by the author and make sure, So, Don't contaminate your speech. Thus, removed to one side some cultural references that only serve as a kind of nostalgic sticker album, what describes us The girls It is a world more typical of the years 50 that of the society that would take place forty years later! A world of girls dressed in uniform, editorials in which praise and love for God were sung, of church choirs, of stuffy nuns with a sullen character, etc. In one of the most surprising sequences, The girls undergo a film session where, on a screen (Didn't the videos exist??) You must see the film by Ladislao Vajda!Marcellin bread and wine!, a deliberate and by no means trivial reference. I'm not saying all this didn't happen., but, was it really representative? And most importantly, already begun the path towards the next century, Was it really that decisive?? To curl the curl even more, It is worth stopping at the character of Clara's mother (men do not appear in the film, I don't know with what intention), single mother, disowned for this by her family who, randomly, lives in a small rural town, far from the city of Zaragoza where she resides (or the one who has escaped). But not even the people of Aragon of that time lived so isolated from that prevailing modernity. (His children took it very seriously about getting up to speed on what they caught every weekend.), and even if it had been the cause of comments, I don't think I would have been a victim of the kind of rejection that the film shows., a plot that seems rescued from a Juan Antonio Bardem film. A disowned mother, in theory, for not complying with the established, but that she is more severe than the nuns themselves when it comes to forcing her daughter to submit to the rigor of the rules imposed by the center for, later, Let him pick up the Interviú magazine to do the crossword puzzles!!, and then get involved in praying, devoted, in front of his father's grave. An artifice that is difficult to assume as a representation among the many examples that the film uses.
The girls It is a film that drinks and copies in many scenes (the tobacco sequence, cinema projection, porn magazines, the initiatory and “rebellious” tone itself) of Goodbye boys of Louis Malle. But where the French director took a context to make a reflection (about life in occupied France during the Second World War and the game of betrayal and power that this entailed within the relationships in French society), Exactly the opposite happens here.. Palomero assumes a reflection, and then build the appropriate context. However, so that everything fits, must leave reality out. So, when the movie ends, I have several doubts. What is the author talking about?? From your own experience? Or does it perhaps intend to make a certain social or political claim referring to a moment in our recent history?? The first has little distance, because it is too particular a case, an anecdote that does not affect us as viewers, leaving us out of the plot. I don't find the second representative and I think it responds more to a prejudice than to the reality experienced in a specific time by a specific society.. GERARDO LEON
