When one goes to see a film by Juanma Bajo Ulloa, You must know in advance that you are going to enter a very particular world. This has been the line that has marked his cinema since the beginning of his long and, however, little neat career. Ulloa, as he commented at the presentation of his latest work at the Lys cinemas in Valencia, which opens this Friday in commercial theaters, moves from the margins, and it is from that place where he draws his characters and his stories.. The margins of the system, the margins of the subconscious, the margins of reality and imagination.
It will be in that same space on the sidelines where we pick up the protagonist of Baby, a young addict who has a child in the solitude of a filthy apartment located in a block of buildings in a city that could be anyone. Her drug addiction makes her neglect the child, who survives by pure miracle until a social worker takes pity on her and gives her mother the phone number of a strange woman who could solve her situation.. Maybe because he doesn't know what he's doing., maybe because of the money he hopes to earn with it, Our protagonist gives the child to this strange matron who seems to trade in newborns that she sells to families of high social level.. But, once the deal is closed, The young mother regrets it and will try to get her son back. For it, will have to enter the no less strange mansion in which the matron lives, a place that seems to have come out of a dark gothic tale. And this is how this story begins, precisely, like a story.
From its very conception, Baby It is a piece that can be considered a small miracle. Shot between the years 2019 and the beginning of 2020, The expansion of Covid came to trip the project in the middle of the post-production process. Some difficulties that, happily, They ended up proposing new creative solutions. In bad weather, best face, we could say. “The pandemic has not affected us especially because, fortunately, we had finished filming. What it has caused is a delay in post-production, especially with the recording of the soundtrack that was going to be done in the Basque Country, “where the entire movie was shot”, commented Bajo Ulloa during his presentation at the Lys. “Due to security measures, We couldn't find an orchestra that could record it and, in the end, we had to do it in Bulgaria with the Sofia orchestra, something that, Finally, he has been very lucky because it is one of the best string orchestras there is and, above all, because he has a lot of experience in making music for films. So, I see everything that was going wrong in terms of the dilation of the process, over time, as lucky”.
After his previous tape, the comedy gypsy king, Baby means a clear return of Bajo Ulloa to his first works for the screen. The conception of the image, many of the topics it addresses, They refer us to that young director who aspired, above all, to disturb, put the viewer in a position that questions or refuses to make concessions that would make the journey more pleasant or comfortable. In fact, Sometimes the film strains our resistance to face that truly dark side of life that the author presents to us.. “They ask me a lot if I have returned to the origins and the answer becomes repetitive.”, but I can only answer that I have not left. This is the universe that interests me, I think it was already in my shorts, and it was very clearly in other more personal or intimate films. It is in butterfly wings, in The dead mother, in Fragile; It's a painful universe, fairy tale for adults, where one can find that essence that interests me so much and that goes directly to the desires and fears of the human soul. It is the world of childhood, the world of motherhood, the world of creation and, above all, “the concept of love and the capacity that love has to heal or harm”, said the Basque director.
But if we want to get closer to Baby Perhaps the first thing we have to understand is that we are faced with a film apparatus that does not renounce artifice or a certain mannerism that, you may like it more or less, but it's deliberate. After a hard realistic beginning in which the life of its main character is summarized, Ulloa introduces us to a scenario where the grotesque constantly collides with our perception of the plausible.. Two extremes that confront the conscious with the subconscious, sleep with wakefulness, fantasy with the emptiness of everyday life. In this sense, The first surprise that the film brings us is that there is not a single line of dialogue in it., which is already, per se, a challenge for the contemporary public. Cinema that connects or takes root with its origins. But this is not a silent film.. In fact, the sound work behind the images is presented as a fundamental support, not only because of its technical texture, but for its meaning and contribution to the narrative development of the story. This resort to dispensing with dialogue is not something new in Bajo Ulloa's cinema.. In fact, already in butterfly wings or in The dead mother o, even, in Fragile, used that void of dialogue for long passages. Something of all this must have already been going through the head of the director who, in the end, dared to put it into practice. “I have come across interviews in which I say that my ideal film is a film without dialogues. I didn't remember, but someone recently reminded me that I had said it (…) The creator often uses text out of fear and comfort. Also because of what happens currently, everything has to be chewed and the viewer is considered a simple consumer who has no criteria., when there are much more interesting elements and that, besides, They are typical of cinema”, Ulloa commented. “In the first version of the film, there was text. There were also more characters and more decorations, but, trying to go to that essence, to that desire to be pure with the feeling I had and with the narration, I was eliminating characters, decorated, I managed to eliminate, even, to the extras, and the text was reduced to its minimum expression. Some small texts were shot that, in the assembly, I decided to delete it because I felt like I wasn't being honest with what I was doing.. It has been a process. Yes it is true that, unconsciously, I still wanted it, But it has been happening.”
This formal decision, leads Bajo Ulloa to work with the actors from pure expressiveness, by not having the support of a dialogue that explains or suggests what they feel or think at all times. A bet that conditions, definitely, the development of a story that is only supported by actions, in looks and expressions to expose the feelings and emotions that come into play here. Again, We return to silent cinema to understand this bet. But Ulloa does not refuse to use all the symbolic and metaphorical potential that the staging and, above all, the assembly. Supported by an almost permanent soundtrack, The ultimate meaning of this work is found in the contrast between images whose value is measured from what they suggest to a viewer to whom a range of readings is opened as wide as the gazes placed in front of the screen.. So, accompanying the characters' adventures, as impassive witnesses of the misfortunes that appear in the lives of human beings, Here appear a series of images of animals that could well remind us, in its discursive function, a Hunter's night by Charles Laughton. a deer, a spider that devours a grasshopper that has fallen into its webs, some crows that caw as they fly over the landscape in which the events take place or the same noise of the rain rises, So, in readers of those sensations that the film tries to transmit. Nature charges, in this way, an essential value. Although Ulloa was opposed to giving a conscious and concrete explanation of the meaning of these images, gave us some clues about it. “The intention of the film is to express that there is no separation or difference between some elements and others on this planet, that everything is an organism that is interconnected, It is an ecosystem.”, commented. “We have the perception that everything is a tool at our service.”, but it's not true. And it has never been less true than now and we have never had so much information to understand that it is not true (…) In the film there is no distinction between human characters or animal characters or plants or rain or the house, who is also a character. The connection is so great that any imbalance with that being that we are causes a conflict, a problem, a disease. That is the intention, create that atmosphere in which one is participating all the time in an action-reaction. Not only the elements of the film, animals and humans, they are connected, but, “In their actions there is a reaction.”.
Looking for that interpretation, we could say that Baby It is a film that speaks to us, above all, of second chances. The protagonist arrives at that mysterious house where the matron lives in search of the son she has just given away.. However, He doesn't seem to know what he wants, is in that state in which no solution seems appropriate. and there, In the midst of crises is when we ask ourselves, who I am? Can we correct the mistakes we have made? But that second chance will not come from outside., but from within ourselves. “The film is about the metamorphosis and the initiation journey of a person who has hit rock bottom., that is mired in fear, in weakness, in those artificial paradises, and that is not believed, and if you don't believe yourself you don't love yourself, and if you don't love yourself you don't love anyone. What happens inside that nightmare? First you look in the mirror, who is beginning to be able to recognize himself and, from there, from the most absolute weakness, is finding elements of strength. And finally it is discovered, not just loving herself, but being able to love the other”, explained Bajo Ulloa.
On that path, Here are some of the director's most beloved songs., as is the case of childhood or religion, that are approached from a peculiar polarity in which the borders between their benefit or the harm that arise from it are blurred., diluted. Childhood is the realm of innocence, but it also appears as a disturbing space. From the same firm, religion, just as it helps us in the face of uncertainty, shows us the dark side of love by instilling in us a primal fear that paralyzes us. “If there is one thing in the film it is duality. And if there is one thing in nature and in life, it is duality.", the director advanced. “We like to put things in a place, cinema has led us a lot in this direction, and if we talk about American cinema, even more. The bad and the good, there is this simplification, but it's not true. The world is polar. There is always one side and another, there is always the positive and the negative. The pandemic is terrible or wonderful, depending on who. For some humans it is terrible. But, And for the organism that we all are?? wonderful. We have stopped the flight forward. There is therefore, two ways of looking at it.”
Con Baby, Juanma Bajo Ulloa once again vindicates himself as that director who puts cinema and his artistic ambitions before the impositions of an industry that may not have recognized him as he deserves or, at least, as expected of that young promise that marked an entire generation of viewers at the beginning of the decade of the 90. A cinema made with hands, as you like to say. That same attitude that today, like yesterday, calls for increasingly rare creative freedom, for dissident. “If at the time of the dictatorship there was pure and simple censorship, In the current era the state and governments, The power, This ministry has been spared because it has turned the spectators into censors. It is no longer necessary for anyone to cut the movies. Free scripts are no longer written because the scriptwriters themselves censor themselves, "The production companies only produce what coincides with the unique thought and the viewers have been conveniently indoctrinated to point the finger at what is not appropriate.", Bajo Ulloa reflected before the media. “Power always tries to silence creative freedom or have it under its lap and under its control.”. Having said that, The way that there has been throughout life to bypass this censorship has been through metaphor, the symbol and through non-direct narration. I believe that the films that are being made and the art that is being made is a rational art. Art has never been so ugly as in this era. You go out to the street and see the buildings that our architects make, the places they make... Do they make them or do the computers? Movies are made by computers, music is made by logarithms and people walk down the street connected to machines. “It is a total disconnection from reality.”. Faced with this disturbing reality, Under Ulloa he demanded the figure of a creator who works from feelings and emotions., not from that rationality that, understand, has perversely changed the rules of the game. “I believe that the creator has to create from viscerality, from the guts and from the emotion, and that always goes against the system, es incompatible. I have never understood these people who believe that the creators who are supported by the system and are on the covers of all the magazines are independent. I find that confusion very funny.. There are filmmakers from the system, we know them. There are two or three, and they are everywhere and they do things, and they roll every year. Some are talented and some less so., but they are under that discipline. And something is happening that seems shocking to me., but it is very graphic. I believe that a politician should be a professional who, from rationality, manages public resources to improve the lives of citizens and artists should be irrational people, visceral, emotional people who do what they want. In fact, They don't know why they do it nor can they know.. They do it because they can't help but do it.. But we are in a society in which creators are rational and politicians are visceral. “It's the world upside down.”
In this context, raise a movie like Baby is done, in the eyes of the Basque director, an almost biblical task. “When a film is neither in political correctness nor in that ideology and, simply, It tells a story and it is free and it does not belong to that pseudo-industrial machinery that we have in this country., It becomes very complicated because what we call free creation has basically disappeared or is disappearing at a forced pace.. Fortunately, We have the support of the Álava council because we were trying to film on our land, which encouraged other institutions to support it and finally Spanish Television entered and the film was raised. So it's been very difficult. It took four years to build it.. And the question that arises is, can i do it again? And the answer is suspense, “uncertainty”, Bajo Ulloa reflected on his nearest future. Let's hope that uncertainty clears up sooner next time.. GERARDO LEON
