Original title: Petra ·Jaime Rosales · Spain · 2018 · Script: Jaime Rosales, Michel Gastambide, Clara Roquet · Interpreters: Marisa Paredes, Barbara Lennie, Alex Brendemül, Joan Botey.
Con Beautiful youth, his fifth feature film, The Catalan director Jaime Rosales seemed to take an unexpected turn on the guidelines that had characterized his cinematographic work until then.. Of a cinema based on the transmission of sensations, Rosales surprised with a piece that was based on a somewhat more conventional script with that story of a young couple trying to make a future for themselves in that Spain in crisis in which we continue to be immersed.. That first “experiment” seemed to have continuity in his next production, Petra. At least, This is how the director himself strives to tell it to the media and it is reflected in the production notes that accompany its theatrical release.. In the opinion of this chronicler, however, what is seen does not correspond one hundred percent with the supposed intentions. And it is that, sometimes, the unconscious imposes itself on our desires. A purely commercial strategy so as not to scare away the box office?? Could be. What has been said so far, however, should not be understood as a reproach. Let's say it now to clear up doubts. Despite certain small obstacles, what we will comment, Petra It is a magnificent work that reflects the creative maturity of its director..
Petra takes the name of its protagonist, a young painter who enters Jaume's studio, an old and famous sculptor with whom, thanks to a scholarship, a guardianship process begins. But Petra's intentions are different.. After the death of his mother, The young woman searches for a father she never knew and who she believes she has found in the figure of Jaume. Things won't be so easy. Jaume soon reveals a despotic and manipulative character., thing that, obviously, It's going to make the relationship between the two difficult.. On the way, Petra will meet Lucas, the son of that, a mature man full of insecurities who lives under the psychological yoke of his father, and Marisa, mother of Lucas and wife of Jaume, with whom he seems to share his radically cynical vision of life.
With these elements, Rosales and his two scriptwriters build a framework with clear soap opera overtones. The main issue to be resolved will be to discover if Jaume is Petra's true father.. In the middle, We will find a family united by relationships of economic and sentimental submission. Jaume runs his studio just like his family and other personal relationships.: governing them on the basis of tortuous tugs of war, between dependence and the need to escape from that submission with which he binds everyone around him. A death without apparent justification, a mystery, an impossible love, the desire to know the truth, revenge, They will be the main elements of the plot. And if we stick to it, we could say yes, that Jaime Rosales has followed the path of his previous film, openly distancing himself from his initial formal proposals. Nothing is missing: a linear story, a clear conflict and, finally, its apparent resolution. But this is more complicated. And richer, Of course.
The first thing Rosales does is break the story into blocks of chapters whose logical order alters.. With labels with strong quixotic reminiscences (a delicious tribute), Rosales manages to build a kind of game, a puzzle that disorganizes and then reorganizes in the public's mind. With it, manages to mislead the attention of a viewer who is caught by the need to know the origin and causes of this conflict, where will things end. The numbering of the chapters already corresponds in itself to a mystery that the public wants to unravel.. Forward and backward and, then, back again where we left off. In addition to fueling doubt, This strategy helps the director to distance himself from what brought him closer to his previous film., the mentioned Beautiful youth, to bring him emotionally closer to his first works, not only because it breaks the linearity of the story, but because that breakup has a precise intention.
Both in Headshot, like in loneliness o The hours of the day, Rosales' cinema is not based so much on the causality of events, as in the force of a few events, sometimes unexpected, always deeply dramatic and shocking, that Rosales put on the screen with the intention, more than giving vent to an argument, to convey an impression: The loneliness, helplessness, the violence that surrounds us and that overwhelms us daily. Here the most valuable part of the film is, again, in that same. The interesting thing about Petra It is not perceived as much in the resolution of the mystery that starts the plot (who is the father of your protagonist), as in that specific moment of confrontation of the characters, in that environment that you breathe and that traps you like a spider web and in which you feel the pain that devastates you. Feel that pain, make it your own, suffer the impact of that discovery, sometimes in a gesture, in that revealing phrase, not information, but of that reaction that pushes us to a feeling, It is what gives value to the film as a sensitive experience. And that's where, as we said, the work moves away from its precedent. So much so that, in fact, when the tape gets stuck, out of necessity, in focusing on the mere plot lines that support the script (who is who, the reason for this or that other), the film is shaky and is about to lose its credibility, coming close at some point to the ways of an Almodóvar (The presence of Marisa Paredes may influence this perception). Fortunately, Those small bumps are soon overcome and we pass over them without too many injuries.
Another relevant element is found in its distribution. Again, Rosales clings to his first works by mixing non-professional actors with others who are professional.. The pairing gives a mixture of the most forceful and, still highlighting the work of the entire casting (magnificent Marisa Paredes, Barbara Lennie and Alex Brendemül who always achieves his best records with Rosales), We must especially highlight who it is, definitely, one of the surprises that this movie holds. With a truly extraordinary performance, Joan Botey (profession engineer in real life), embodies a Jaume who concentrates all the conflicts that are resolved here. In the spontaneous nonchalance with which he dismisses his zero interest, his obvious disregard for the feelings of others, we find the image of evil in its purest form. To achieve interpretive coherence between one another, Rosales clings to a way of dialogue that, again, returns him to his first works. Yes in Beautiful youthThese dialogues are tied to the strict scaffolding imposed by the plot., here the doubt appears again, the empty spaces, hesitations as ways of advancing what the characters want to say and that, as in life itself, sometimes they don't know how to express, or they search in their head how they should do it, of scenes that resemble everyday conversation more than a classical dramatic form. With it, Rosales allows us to expand the game between what is hidden and what is revealed, what is said and what is kept, clave, as we will see, of Petra.
The use of the camera is, definitely, another relevant factor. In order not to lose that spontaneity sought, Rosales shoots each sequence in a single shot, uncut, in such a way that the daily intimacy that the viewer wants to discover cannot be interrupted.. A camera that, as i said in this interview, It functions as a kind of superior entity that visualizes everything and is situated above the characters., almost like protecting them. Rosales often starts from a position outside the scene, in front of the frame of a door that leads to the space that is going to be shown, entering slowly, involving creatures that end up forming a whole with that physical environment, no less relevant than what happens. A slight wandering to one side abandons one of them to choose the other, offering a game of off-screen that charges the scene with dramatic force. It is not strange that, when watching this movie, The name of the Austrian director Michel Haneke emerges as a close reference in Rosales' cinema. And it is that, as in the case of the director of Amor, what is not seen, a phrase said by the one who remains hidden from our eyes, has greater impact. You don't have to teach everything.
Con Petra, Jaime Rosales offers us a piece that points in multiple directions. Aim, Of course, to the family as a contender for many of the dramas that afflict us. Most of the conflicts that occur in almost any area of life are concentrated within the family nucleus.: amor, passion, disappointments, The betrayal. Using Jaume's character as an excuse (perhaps the true protagonist of this story) Rosales forces us to confront the mechanisms of power in a society that has made unreserved cynicism its pure essence.. Despite his despotic character, Jaume is what we could consider a successful man. His works are highly valued and, with the abundant money he earns with them, Live in a luxurious house with all the amenities you can afford. in front of him, his son Lucas, sheltering itself in more scrupulous morality and feelings, he is a failure, both on the material and emotional levels. And the same thing happens to Petra. The art world is thus portrayed as a mirror of the mercantilist and capitalist world in which we live.. If what matters is making money, as Jaume seems to maintain, What the artist behind the work is like doesn't affect us much.. The shine of success, part will metal, covers corruption of the entire system.
The truth will set you free, the bible says. Jaime Rosales comes to question this maxim, at least initially. And he does it not so much because that hidden truth, what the characters try to hide is, by herself, so destructive. It is the interested management of that truth, its concealment to protect the individual interests of each one, her self-interested revelation to hurt the person next door what makes her so dangerous. And here there is a difference with respect to the Rosales of his first works. Because if there it left a certain bittersweet taste in the viewer, fruit of that portrait without hot cloths of the world that showed us, our own world, here, in strict respect with that soap opera dramaturgy to which it claims to apply, opens a way out for us. We will not reveal it. GERARDO LEON
