Film review
What will remain of these days drunk with your presence, when you are your absence and I am my melancholy?» These are the first stanzas of the song by Rosa León with which Ángeles González-Sinde (‘La lucky dormada’, ‘A word of yours’) closes her adaptation of ‘El comensal’, some verses that, heard from the present, have an echo prescient that blends perfectly with the atmosphere of Gabriela Ybarra’s autobiographical novel. Neither in the images nor in the text is the political conflict discussed, and yet it is the politics of memory that is the focus of the drama faced by the eldest son of a Basque industrialist kidnapped and cowardly murdered by a terrorist commando and the daughter of it, a woman who refuses to bury in oblivion the wounds and trauma that fractured her family. Without fingers, filipicas or accusing speeches, González-Sinde subtly brings out the thunderous silence and the equidistance of Basque society, although the importance of what he proposes is not reflected in a narrative proposal that abuses time jumps and parallel montage, to scratch emotions that are more indebted to the excellent performances of Ginés García Millán and Susana Abaitua than to the neat although flat staging of the director and screenwriter from Madrid.
The diner
Spain. 2022. 100 m. (12). Drama.
Director:
Ángeles González-Sinde.Interpreters:
Susana Abaitua, Ginés García Millán, Adriana Ozores.