La Estrella

Estrella (Ingrid Rubio) is cheerful, positive and generous with her surroundings, although it seems that she has forgotten to take care of herself. She is a cleaner who who works along with her friend Trini (Carmen Machi) and lives with her boyfriend Salva (Marc Clotet) .They both want to buy a flat but suffer a lot of financial hardship . But she soon discovers that she has a gift for flamenco and the right to be happy.

Moving drama with plenty of emotion , delusions , plot twists , an actual events about a Catalan location , Santa Coloma de Gramanet, Barcelona . It is a slow-moving picture in which intense drama is finely developed from start to finish , being somewhat of a cinematic cliché, rarely has a feature been so aptly deserving of its description as a really dramatic picture along with some elements from social habits , racism , gender violence, urban goings-on and couple relationships. The story is well paced and director makes a passable flick, being his first movie , it is an acceptable yarn, though slow-moving, and tiring, at times. Here interpreters provided a considerable boost to the result . Ingrid Rubio gives a fine acting as the young who makes hard decision and eventually she's still in a dilemma about whether she should make or not . Spanish-style social cinema is still alive as a genre in itself and La Estrella, with the films by Fernando León de Aranoa as tips of an iceberg that , for better or worse , has always managed to combine social drama and costum comedy on the same narrative level . La Estrella results to be an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Belén Carmona, who also wrote the screenplay for the film along with director Aranda himself , proves incapable of contributing anything completely new to the genre, neither in its narrative part nor in its strictly technical aspect , being shot on location in Carmona, Sevilla, Andalucía, and Santa Coloma de Gramanet, Barcelona, Catalonia . In the first, the film starts from the well-known clichés about certain social scourges , already seen a thousand times in so many other films . And in its development and resolution it limits itself to neatly applying the intricacies and plot twists established by the manual , thus generating a mostly predictable plot , which is also not offered to us through an attractive package adding a colorful cinematography and emotive musical score with full of Andalucial music and flamenco dance . A film that, in short, would not deserve more attention without the exultant overwhelming and devoted leading role of a top-notch actress like Ingrid Rubio. She alone, her photogenic freshness and her radiant display of talent, warrant viewing the film. Like the Star of the title, the actress marks one of her best film works of her entire career, covered by a contagious freshness , which makes her punctual comedic moments irresistible, and an emotional involvement with her astonishing role, revealed throughout of all the footage and whose high point is the tragic and brilliant emotional transition that she stars in one of the flamenco classes and in which the methodical work of the actress is sensationally hidden behind the vivid expression of the character's thoughts. She is nicely accompanied by a good remaining cast , such as Carmen Machi who soberly embeds herself in the skin of her battered housewife and successfully dodges the cliché inherent in her character while at the same time managing to detach herself moderately from the television persona that made her famous and into whose arms it might have been easy to fall. If her dramatic scope in the film is not effective, it is precisely because of the second and convenient place to which her character is reduced in the narrative , a typical abused wife , and for the benefit of the ultimate attitude of the film. Marc Clotet avoids falling into the sloppy facility when it comes to focusing and exposing the internal duality of his role before the camera, contributing truth and meaning to his somewhat superficial and fake motivations . Fele Martínez plays adequately as the seductive folksy , while Carlos Blanco does what he can with a terribly little sketched role . To a lesser extent, the veterans Fanny de Castro and María Alfonsa Rosso return to their most popular registers to decorate with their presence.

This film debut directed by the usual producer Alberto Aranda, undisguisedly following in the footsteps of this type of cinema with a long, although young, tradition in our country. As he's usually a nice producer , financing important Spanish films , such as : Oswald El falsificador , 42 segundos, El Cadaver de Anna Fritz , Loco por ella, Orígenes secretos Loco por ella, Pies de Barro , Enigma Cervantes , Saving Grace , El Pregón ,among others. Rating : 5.5/10. Average but acceptable and passable.