Original title: Di jiu tian chang · Wang Xiaoshuai · China · 2019 · Script: Mei Ah, Wang Xiaoshuai · Interpreters: Liya Ai, You Jiang, Zhao-Yan Guo-Zhang.
Original title: A ghost story · Alejandro Amenábar · Spain · 2019 · Script: Alejandro Amenábar, Alejandro Hernandez · Interpreters: Karra Elejalde, Eduard Fernandez, Saints Please.
Yaojun Liu and Liyun Wang are a young couple who live with their teenage son in a small, run-down coastal town in China.. We immediately understand that the relationship between the couple and the young Xing Liu is not going exactly well and, although at first, We attribute these conflicts to the logical generational confrontation, little by little we realize that something is happening here that they are hiding from us. As time goes by, We will discover the secrets that this modest family keeps and that will be part of their lives throughout the years.. Conflicts that come from the past and are projected into the future, that is to say, our present, and that serve the Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai to make a generous examination of the last three decades of social development, political and economic through which your country has gone.
It is precisely this sober exercise of bringing together this entire historical period in a single work through the individual dramas of its characters., where we find the best of See you forever, my son. With a complex structure that plays with dramatic time based on time jumps that take us from the narrative present to the past., and from there to the future (what is historical present), Wang Xiaoshuai goes through all the phases of the evolution of the Chinese regime, since the most closed era of socialization and the implementation of one-child policies, to the leap to market capitalism in which it is currently immersed. And he does it by looking, not in big events, but in how all these changes have affected characters that, in the text by Xiaoshuai and his co-writer, They exemplify the ordinary citizen, mere spectator of a process from which he suffers its consequences, but in which he is prohibited from participating. You have no voice or vote, but on his shoulders falls the entire weight of a History of which he may not even be aware, much less understand, and whose only goal is to try to survive in the best way he can.
However, although when the screening ends everything has been more or less clarified, It is in the construction of that structure where the biggest flaws that this film makes lie.. Much of the game played by the director and co-writer is based on the fact of hiding from the viewer those dark secrets that afflict the lives of their long-suffering protagonists.. However, so much effort to hide information from the public, linked to a production job that does not facilitate (due to the proximity in time of the development of events) distinguish the role that some characters play or at what precise moment in the story we are, they muddy the clarity of the story, delaying the development of an argument that becomes unnecessarily cumbersome. That feeling of confusion delays the progress of a drama that is less complex than it seems., leaving the public with the impression that the artifact is not walking anywhere in much of the first third of a production that reaches three hours of footage.
However, The greatest burden that this film drags is found in many of the adventures suffered by its main protagonists.. See you forever, my son es, above all, a melodrama, gender that, in these times, it is advisable to handle with care, especially in a production that aspires to be realistic. The contrast between the historical background and the conflicts suffered by the characters puts in check the ambition of the portrait to which the film aspires., a condition that also affects the political discourse that contains, because it is hardly credible that so many things happen to this couple sunk in a kind of karmic fatality that, sometimes, they themselves seem to provoke. A fatality that puts the credibility of the entire network at stake. But it is that, besides, It is precisely the very fact that they are the only ones who suffer the consequences of each event., which dismantles the theoretical sociological analysis to which the director dedicates himself. So, It is difficult to approach the problem of the one-child policies imposed by the Chinese regime since the late 1970s., If we refer to a case as special as the one at hand (whose details we will not reveal). The bet remains, in this way, lackluster from a dramatic point of view, entangled in the recesses of a plot whose resolution, besides, we guessed from the first moment, anticipated at each step through the script. It is missed, in addition, that Wang Xiaoshuai remains precisely on the verge of analyzing the consequences of the current policy of aggressive capitalism into which the regime has mutated and that, On the screen, They seem like the culmination or solution to all the problems experienced by the characters.. The things, finally, they are fine.
It is very difficult to approach the latest film by director Alejandro Amenábar While the war lasts. And if, in the eyes of this chronicler, This is so, It is not because of the complexity of the proposal, but because Amenábar tries so hard not to get his fingers caught with the topic he has decided to address, His intentions are so disguised in a convoluted game of concealment that it is difficult to unravel., after a single viewing, what are your real intentions, a reflection that would deserve a calmer analysis and would involve conscientious work to dismantle the script on which it is based. Nevertheless, Even in a first viewing, some clues of what we are trying to expose are perceived.. It seems as if Amenábar had tried to take a thorny issue by the horns, and then dedicate a good part of his efforts to planting traps along the way with the sole goal of not being caught in a mistake..
As is known, While the war lasts approaches the figure of Miguel de Unamuno at a key moment in his life. His strong opposition to the drift that the Second Spanish Republic had taken, had led him to support a military uprising that he understood was necessary to bring order to that mess.. However, just as the film tells, He was soon to realize that the uprising was not intended to reestablish the rules of the democratic apparatus, but to impose a fascist military dictatorship with which to monopolize power.
Amenábar dares to address a certainly tricky issue. Using Unamuno as a messenger, the director of The others comes to try to pacify the polarized Spanish political landscape. A scenario that today, like then, finds itself embroiled between two irreconcilable sides that do not seem to want to talk to each other. And this is where it seems that Amenábar throws a certain courage into the matter when trying, through the mouth of his character, to analyze with a critical eye a political period that today is presented in Spain almost as a taboo, the Second Republic, period of strong political disputes and extreme tensions that could well resemble our present (hence the opportunism, that is not appropriate, of the tape). In one of the most notable sequences and, for a moment, truly human movie, Unamuno and his friend Salvador Vila discuss on the outskirts of Salamanca about the political situation in which the country finds itself. In front of the Castilian landscape, They become entangled in a dispute in which, we understand, they will never agree. And who hasn't ever found themselves in that situation?? With a few elements, Amenábar manages to represent that dialogue of the deaf in which we usually find ourselves entangled, in which neither of the two parties will give in and the exhibition and, above all, the attempt to be guided by rational arguments is always put aside.
But later, It seems as if Amenábar wanted to cover his back, let us not, like Unamuno, accuse him of supporting what he should not. For it, contrasts the intellectual process that its protagonist faces with the chain of events through which Franco went from being just another soldier within the group of rebels., to take absolute command and become head of the future State that would emerge after the conflict. The problem is that Amenábar tries so hard to describe the supposed irrationality of Franco and his supporters, that the portrait is frankly caricatured to a point where, abandoned any intention of realism, its vision of the political and intellectual conflict it addresses becomes faded and loses its potential. It doesn't matter which side the viewer sits on.. Not even the critic most opposed to the postulates of the future dictator can accept being taken along such beaten and vulgar paths.. But his caricature is so exaggerated that, at times, can inspire the opposite of what you aspire to. Amenábar will remain in the annals of Spanish cinema for having discovered the comic potential of the Milan-Astray/Franco duo.. What a couple of comedians our country has lost! Think what everyone thinks, The problem is that Amenábar does not address an intelligent viewer, but to an audience that does not understand formal or intellectual subtleties and that gladly accepts a broad-stroke discourse that, at this point, can't be useful to anyone. For Amenábar, the public is not composed of mature and educated individuals, but children who accept simple explanations more typical of a children's television program. And maybe, in certain aspects, be right. It's just that, on issues like this, the artist is required to go beyond the desire to satisfy or treat with condescension and paternalism an audience that is usually, by itself and frequently, undemanding. I wonder what or what purpose this movie really serves.. What does it clarify for us?. I have no idea.
The acting work of the cast of this film has been praised in various chronicles.. And certainly count on Karra Elejalde or Eduard Fernández at the head was a guarantee. The cast responds with ease to what the conductor demands, The problem is that it takes them through excessively vaudevillian terrain.. Perhaps female characters have a greater opportunity to display fuller and more forceful compositions., with more nuances. The fact is that everything responds to a theatricality very far from the canons of contemporary cinema. The staging is not very successful either and the hand of its maker is perceived from light years away.. as a sample, the first scene of the movie. War just declared, National troops take the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca. Soldiers take positions against any attempted insurrection, deploying weapons. But the direction of that moment seems more typical of someone who is preparing a manequinn challenge historic, that whoever wants to introduce us to cinematically realistic events. If a few weeks ago we praised Tarantino's staging in his reproduction of the sixties in the United States, the opposite happens here. It's not just the artistic part, It is the direction of the group that takes us off the screen.
The director has had an eye Now when choosing the topic and object of your proposal, that must be recognized. Amenábar has a good hand for what we call “commercial”. But he is very far from being the artist who would have made this issue a real challenge for the public.. In fact, It is when he himself faces thorny questions that he hides an answer that perhaps he does not dare to formulate.. After his argument with his friend Salvador Vila, This one considers Unamuno impossible. He doesn't seem satisfied with anything. He didn't like the monarchy. He doesn't like The Republic. Nor does it seem related to the postulates of the rebels. What do you want then??, the young professor asks his friend. Here was the epicenter of the matter. But Amenábar does not dare to respond and his Unamuno remains silent.. More difficult to accept is his intention for us to feel sympathy for a character who is paralyzed when the Falangists take his young colleague prisoner.. In a somewhat calculated script effect, Unamuno does not react and rather behaves like a child who is afraid of being slapped. In the following sequence, He behaves as if that drama had not occurred or had not caused the slightest emotional impact on his mind.. When, later, deliver the famous university speech with which he wants to redeem the character, I doubt it will achieve the desired cathartic effect. Without a doubt the complexity of a figure like Unamuno, well brought to the present, deserved to be addressed by another more learned director. GERARDO LEON
