The possibility of death ends with any love of hope or, upside down, it simply makes it possible.
Kant’s famous pigeon dreamed of flying faster and without difficulty if he could only do it without air.
And, as he ended up knowing her and each of the 308 species of bounds that exist, he only charged true consciousness of the sense of wind to the first drought as soon as he was granted the desire.
‘A year, one night’, the work of Isaki Lacuesta that follows its brand new golden shell ‘between two waters’, lives all of it in the closeness of the intimate and hidden obviousness of life, of that called normality.
“The question is: Is it necessary that they shoot us so that we realize what we really care about?” The director said barely gave him the floor.
And in the perfectly rhetorical questionnaire and with feathers it was the very sense of a film as agonyful as free, vibrant and welcoming, illuminated and conscious at the same time of the darkness that dwells.
On Monday, the ribbon was presented at this strange Berlinale as a preamble to land in Berlin of Spanish cinema (Tuesday is the turn – Entrementos, very attentive – of Carla Simón) and, from his hand, came the first chance of a certain possibility of a
Golden Bear. ‘A year, one night’ stands on the book of memories and wounds of Ramón González.
He was in Bataclan on the day of the attack.
He went on foot from the concert hall in which about 90 people were filled.
He wanted nothing from the memory of him stained with blood from him to be lost and, he barely arrived home, he launched himself to write convinced that the passage of time was the enemy of him.
He refuses to be defined as a survivor for the simple reason that the intention of him is only to live, recover his life or, in Colombofilic terms (which are also Kantians), to feel the temperature of the air.
Simply.
Well, the film rather than just to silence the intention and sense of González’s story, orders it and gives meaning.
Even more.
The director’s strategy is to portray the interpreted couple close to perfection by Noémy Merlant and Nahuel Pérez Biscayat at all times possible during what lasts one year.
They are seen right after the massacre and then remained engaged in the works and days of a few weeks later, a few months, a year.
They load with a weight that sinks them and places them in front of the eyes the simple evidence of the weight, of the weight of life.
Everything is offered at the same time, without established chronologies and maps, in a prodigious puzzle of clairvoyant cinema where the uneasiness live with hope, anguish with clarity, reality with desire and past with the future.
What matters in any case is the diaphanous and everyday texture of, again, the air.
Lacpión manages to compose his most ambitious and less derivative work.
With a precision of Metronome, ‘a year, one night’ does not leave your intention or the dream of it at any time.
The obsessive staging behind the walking by erratic force of the protagonists never obscures neither alters the purpose of a work always pending of a directed claim of the most hand, of the nearby, of simply essential.
He prefers to rethink his life from his fundamentals.
After what was taken as close to death, everything charges a new meaning.
And in the permanent externalization of a trauma that does not end, he ends up choking everything.
For drowning at all.
She, on the other hand, pretends that nothing has happened.
In the burden of it and in the logic of it, she can not allow the brutality of the gross to determine a second of what remains to live.
And so, in the constant obligation of oblivion, she ends up forgetting everything.
For forgetting at all.
In the same way that Isaki braid the times of the past to the future and return to start, she entangled the two characters converted into archetypes in a hypnotic dancing of fear and audacity, panic and tranquility, of revolution and precipices.
He is a kind of funes the memorious condemned to remember everything and delivered, therefore, to make every moment in bataclan the measure of everything else and everything that will come.
He lives arrested in the inability to act.
She remembers the character designed by Beckett that makes the constant act and speak the only reason of being of him.
She, by not having memory, ends up because she also lacks life.
If you want, and for hurrying the interpretation, lactated in the company of its comenders Isa Campo and Fran Araújo ends up making a perfect drawing, both in negative and positive, of what time has given to call patriarchy.
But that is to advance might more reading the account.
Also, why not, the film, and here his deep wisdom, achieves a careful reflection on the very sense of the story.
The air of the paloma above is not just an existential metaphor linked to the evident of life;
It also applies as an excuse to unravel the tools that make up the very sense of the narrative.
‘A year, one night’ wants at all times to give the viewer the way the memory orders the past, condition the present and define, without a doubt, the future.
You can, of course, add the reading that the pandemic always requires.
The Coronavirus, as the attack, has split the members in two.
Or in more pieces even.
So things, and with permission from Claire Denis, from the Chinese film by Li Ruijun ‘Return to Dust’ and, above all, that proverbial enigma and sonmbol that is ‘Manto de gemas’, from Natalia López Gallardo, the last work
From Isaki Lacuesta Well, well worth a golden bear. All this, yes, waiting for Alcarràs, Carla Simón.
