La soledad

Incredibly original, no movements of the camera, no music. Just two stories, just two lives, shown in an incredibly natural way.

Unfortunately for foreigners it will be impossible to understand the typical Spanish way of talking of the actors. Maybe they are a little bit polite, in Spain we are more rude while talking, especially in a village where one of the characters (Adela -> Sonia Almarcha) is supposed to come from.

In some movies, I have seen actors trying to be natural, but finally they end artificial, in this case the director has managed to make their cast simply real. The performance of the actors is very high, you can believe them...! Especially (Antonia -> Petra Martínez) a very typical Spanish mother who can do anything for their daughters, even forgetting her needs to give the most to them. I have checked the awards and she got just one, I guess there were very good performances that year because on the contrary, I cannot believe that her work does not deserve more.

The movie may be categorized as slow, but I think the speed of it is adequate and necessary to represent reality.

Finally, I really liked that due to the fix camera, we could watch the characters from perspectives that are not usual in films. It is a great, great movie.

Jaime Rosales's 'La Soledad' is a bit of an experimental mood-piece. To give it a very slice of life feel, Rosales uses no music or the typical postcard visuals and special effects. It follows the life of a single mother who moves to Madrid from the countryside and of a widow quietly battling her own struggles.

There isn't much that is 'happening' in the film per se. Many of the visuals pretty much mimic glimpses of daily life in Madrid. However, the director focuses too much on the simple visuals that are just there and, as a result, 'La Soledad' moves at a very slow pace. There is some gratuitous nudity (perhaps to compensate for the lethargic pace). Only in the last half hour does it pick up but overall the film failed to keep me engaged.

While the split-screen idea is quite new in Spanish films, at times it serves no purpose and is rather distracting. With the exception of Petra Martinez, most of the actors do a passable job that is nothing particularly outstanding but nothing dreadful either. Martinez is the one who gives a memorable performance as the mother of three trying to hold on to her memory and identity while her selfish eldest daughter continues to push her mother into selling her house to buy a guest house.

Anyway, to sum it up, the editing was a big disadvantage for me especially for a film that heavily relies on mood and less on story.

I never saw anything as dreadful as this movie in my life. Never, I swear! It looks as done with a few Euro (for the camera rental), and nobody working on it got paid I'm sure. It couldn't possibly be any other way; everything is so static that one could fall asleep in every scene --they are THAT LONG--, the camera remains static for minutes at a time, the characters speak utterly boring lines.

The split screen is done with a vengeance to the bitter end of this horrible movie, almost for every scene.

One is forced to seat and seat, watching them do household chores like ironing COMPLETELY two T shirts (or something similar), from the beginning: One sleeve, right side (slOOOOwly), turn it, the other side, turn it; now the other sleeve (slOOOOwly), turn it, the other side, whoops! don't miss that wrinkle! okay, now the bodice of the shirt, be careful because it has to look very nice! let's see, first this side, now turn it (slOOOOwly), the other side..., NOW WE FOLD THE DAMNED THING...(slOOOOwly), and carefully once it's been folded, we lay it with care inside a basket full of other garments previously ironed and folded... in front of the camera... I wanted TO SCREEEEEAM!!!!

LET ME OUT OF HERE!! What do I care about these miserable people's problems!! Stupid people, stupid problems, the dialogs are moronic, so are the actors (probably the director's fault). Although..., maybe now that I think about it..., maybe THERE WAS NOT a director..., that's it! for a movie to be this bad, there was not a director!! Almodovar, Dear Almodovar... Where are you?? We need you, please!!

It has been a nice surprise for me to see such a wonderful movie and I recognize that I would not have seen it if it had not been prized with three 2008 Goya Awards (including Best Film and Best Director ones). Of course, Spanish media did not talk too much about it because I can imagine they have not any economical or political interest on it. That is the way they do it.

But it is a delight that those kind of films are still done in 21st century, so simple, with no music and not dramatic special effects, with unknown but credible and natural actors and actresses. This film is an effective portrait of the Spanish society today with all its problems and all its virtues, with no typical images for tourists nor false features to sell a brilliant and fiction image of a Spain that does not actually exist.

I love the calmed atmosphere that wrap the scenes and the usual division of the image in two halves that let the audience have a double perspective of the scene. The static cameras and the frontal shots make me remember Yasujiro Ozu's style, so I like this film even more.

Finally, I must say that this is a film which proves that an excellent film can be done with not big amounts of money: an example to be followed.

The lives of a group of women are forensically examined in exemplary fashion by the Spanish director Jaime Rosales. Rosales is one of the least known of European directors but is also one of the most innovative. Here he uses split screen to a great effect than almost anyone else in recent memory. It's brilliant, it's simple and it never feels 'tricksy'. The setting is Madrid and this superbly acted film is as profound and as moving as anything by Almodovar.

The central characters are Adela, (Sonia Almarcha), a young mother who has moved to Madrid with her baby son and Antonia, (Petra Martinez), an older woman with three grown-up daughters. These women make up the backbone of the film and it's their resilience in the face of tragedy that is the main theme of the picture. The men in their lives do their best but they can't measure up; they are secondary characters, patient and somewhat lost. This is a 'women's picture' in the very best sense of the term yet since its debut at Cannes it's been shamefully overlooked. Seek it out.