‘A whale’: A hired assassin in Zorrozaurre

2023-05-09 18:46:09

Talleres Arro is not the setting one imagines in a science fiction movie. Its milling machines and lathes are the last vestiges of Zorrozaurre’s industrial past. “In a year and a half all this is going to be screwed, that’s how we retire,” one of the workers consoles himself, while a rat slips between the machines in a pavilion that hasn’t changed the least in half a century.

The cranes of the new Bilbao surround a corner that smells of grease and laughter, of crisis and worker pride, an ideal setting to achieve the atmosphere that Pablo Hernando (Vitoria, 1986) needs in his third feature film. ‘Una ballena’ has been filming for five and a half weeks on locations on the island, such as the Artiach factory, and the Port of Bilbao, with a four-day getaway to the Alava town of Okondo. They have one week left to recount in the key of fantastic film noir the adventures of a hired assassin (Ingrid García-Jonsson) in a city suspiciously similar to the Biscayan capital, although her name is never mentioned.

We are in Euskadi, because some dialogue is in Basque. But one bank of the estuary is the Basque Country and the other Italy, which shows that history has not passed as we know it. “It is a world similar to ours, but not exactly the same. Creatures that belong to the legend in the film are real and everyday”, says producer Leire Apellaniz intriguingly. The superhuman faculties of the protagonist, an undetectable and implacable hitman, have to do with beings that inhabit the sea. The villain of the movie is carrying a bag of fresh fish today. Ramón Barea is a trafficker who reigns in this rogue port universe, who looks for rain and gray skies in photography.

“‘A whale’ has elements of fantastic cinema, but above all it is the story of a hired assassin in a world of smugglers and gangsters,” sums up Pablo Hernando. “They are not gangsters in a Tarantinian or Guy Ritchie sense. It has nothing to do with ‘Nikita’, but rather with ‘The Samurai’, by Jean-Pierre Melville (‘The silence of a man’, in its Spanish title). I would rather go there, without all the cool and jazz that that movie has ».

Pablo Hernando gives instructions to Ramón Barea on the set of ‘Una ballena’.

Maika Salguero

The director from Vitoria intends to reflect from the fantastic genre on the archetype of the cold, hieratic, laconic and solitary assassin. The title of his previous works already warns about his independent and countercurrent spirit. Along with shorts like ‘Macedonia modal’, ‘Saliva pangea’ and ‘250 photos of a nail clipper’ we find a feature like ‘Berserker’, in which a writer spins a series of crimes from a human head stuck to the steering wheel of a car. One of its protagonists was Ingrid García-Jonsson.

“She has something that has always caught my attention,” observes Hernando. “She is undeniably beautiful, with a normative type of beauty. But she has never taken advantage of something profoundly strange about her face and how she moves. She really fits the character.” Discovered ten years ago by Jaime Rosales in ‘Beautiful Youth’, the actress born in Sweden and raised in Seville has not stopped working since then and has become very popular due to her appearances in ‘La Resistencia’. “My character is the best in her work because she has powers, she communicates with two worlds, that of darkness and that of light,” she defines without giving too many clues.

From the first scene we see that this murderer is “methodical and leaves no trace.” When he pulls the trigger, his victims don’t know who shot them. He receives a commission from Melville (Ramón Barea), a smuggler who uses the port to traffic strange merchandise. A powerful rival businessman has come to town and is going to take control of his manor. He lives barricaded in a building full of security guards and armed bodyguards. Killing him is a job that only the protagonist can do.

Ingrid García-Jonsson admits that she doesn’t really like shooting with weapons and that she spends all her time checking the pistols. «They give me a lot of respect, especially after the Alec Baldwin thing… A few years ago I shot a war movie, ‘Hostile Zone’. There I learned to assemble and disassemble a rifle and to shoot». For his part, Ramón Barea can walk to work: a few meters from the set is Pabellón 6, the theater where he can always be found when film and television are not calling for him.

Barea is stimulated by the idea that ‘Una ballena’ is going to embalm in cinema a part of Bilbao that will disappear shortly. The actor from ‘Cinco lobitos’ tells that he discovered the Port of Santurtzi while filming the film. «I have that feeling of strangeness with Casco Viejo, which is the landscape of my childhood. Zorrozaurre did not exist for the city, only for the one who worked here. And now it has happened to me with the Port, I had never been inside. It’s something monstrous big.”

Co-starring Eneko Sagardoy, ‘Una ballena’ still has many months of post-production ahead of it to include digital effects. Its producers assure that this is the first fiction feature film in Spain to obtain the Green Film certification, a European green seal that is granted for its sustainability and carbon footprint reduction plan during filming.

Ingrid García-Jonsson in ‘A whale’.

Ingrid García-Jonsson: “Author cinema is not going to disappear”

Ingrid García-Jonnson cites the films of Nicolas Winding Refn and ‘Under the Skin’, by Jonathan Glazer, as possible clues to understand where the shots of ‘Una ballena’ are going. “Pablo doesn’t like references, but for me he is closer to those titles than to a typical action movie.” The actress has never hidden her taste for challenges and personal directors. “They interest me because it is the cinema that I like to see,” she admits. «Pablo is a friend and being in his first film with money makes me very excited. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” The protagonist of ‘Veneciafrenia’ and ‘Explota, explota’ has been active for a decade and has always known auteur cinema in crisis. «These types of films resist because they have their audience. It is necessary to continue doing them because here people innovate, experiment, and later take advantage of larger projects. It seems impossible to me that auteur cinema will disappear. And with artificial intelligence we are going to need more and more unique and personal things.