Valle del Pas, Cantabria (Northern Spain). Present day. Tough times for the cattle farmers, they're being forced to limit their milk production in order to satisfy the European Union regulations. Gildo (Juan Diego) is one of those cattle farmers, he lives in some little village from the Valle del Pas with his to daughters. An old-fashioned widow-man who works from dawn to dusk in order to keep his little business alive. Her daughters, they don't want to live that way anymore, especially the youngest one (she likes to go to the disco, to be trendy...). And so goes their lives, till a Gildo's colleague is murdered (By Gildo himself, or so it would seem) and the son of that man (Luis Tosar) comes to the village to take care of his father's farm.
Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón has directed up to 20 movies, and for me is such an irregular filmmaker and writer. He's made some remarkable movies such as "Habla, Mudita", and he wrote the script (together with JL Borau) for that masterpiece called "Furtivos". But, though his works are usually very good filmed, so sober, and he's a good actor's director, there's always a lack of something in them. In "La Vida Que Te Espera" we find the rural enviroment (that he's portraited in many movies) perfectly prhotographied, Valle del Pas' landscapes are just espectacular. Juan Diego's performance is simply outstanding (he's one of the best spanish actors alive), and Tosar is just Ok in the kind of character he usually plays very skillfully (they could've had a better actress instead of Marta Eturra -typical young actress with nothing to say-). But the script... I think that Aragón fails to recreate the hardness that it should've required that kind of story, the roughness of it all (he achieves it in many sequences, but it's not enough: we're talking about people which lives isolated in the middle of a mountain, just like Heidi and his goddman grandpa). He also does not measure the rhythm that well: the passages of more intensity occurs a long time before the end of the movie: there's sort of a fake-ending, and the last 20 minutes are a little weary, explaining things that we all know by that moment.
Anyway, Juan Diego's performance justifies the viewing. In he'd born in Texas or in California he'd be one of the most well-known actors in the world.
My Rate: 6.5/10
