It all starts with a series of faces. We are in a bar in Madrid, one winter evening in 2020, where pianist Chano Dominguez is performing. After a lively and colorful projection, he continues with a more elegiac piece, entitled Limbes. But the camera lingers on four figures in the audience, captured close-up in their pensive listening. Wonderful way to introduce the spectator to the quadrille of the future protagonists: without embellishments, without words, but simply by their silent presence, swelling with music that embraces the changing reflections of their uncertain souls.
It is about two couples of friends reunited for the first time after a long period not mentioned, but which is called the pandemic, and of which certain traces remain (the mask incidentally put on or removed). Elena (Itsaso Arana) and Dani (Francesco Carril) live in an apartment in Madrid, when Susana (Irene Escolar) and Guillermo (Vito Sanz) take the opportunity to move to the countryside, where they enjoin them to visit them . What the first will end up resolving to, six months later, once the fine weather has come, to spend Sundays in their house with garden.
But is nature really within reach? And country life more than a city fantasy? It is on this argument as thin as a cigarette paper that Jonas Trueba, humble and discreet Spanish prodigy, opens a reflection on the tipping point of age (the approach of forty) and the stops of existence.
tenuous pattern
Come see could constitute for the cinema an equivalent of what the short story is as a literary genre. He first shares its brevity, spanning just over an hour, but still, and more significantly, the aesthetic project. The short story generally works like a magnifying glass: it serves less to deal with major subjects than to circumscribe a detail – a movement of the soul, a decisive moment, a passing mood, etc.
Come and see attaches to this kind of tenuous motif: the numbness of post-lockdown, the difficulty of renewing eroded relationships. Trueba has no other subject than this fabric of prints. His film borders on inconsistency. But, through the eyes of these reunions depicted in two possible anti-spectacular acts (a drink, a lunch), he manages to convey all the lives, possible and impossible, of his characters.
Carried by the relaxation of its quartet of actors, this film is very satisfied with a form of incompleteness, of outline, as shown by its reflexive end in super-8 images. More humble, Trueba conveys his message through the works of others, whom he summons all the time. Come see could thus be compared to a small flared container in which we slip three ideas, a song, a pinch of texts and a few suspended moments, to see if something comes out. The film as a notepad.
