2023-08-24 15:42:55
“All filmmakers feel that what we do is personal because a work of creation makes you see through, but it is true that in this case it is literally personal because it is a film with a documentary aspect. It is also personal for the actresses, who gave themselves in a super generous way to be portrayed with their names and life stories”.
The directorial debut of the actress and screenwriter Sea Plum (Navarra, 1985) he has confession and memory in his heart. With the very literary title ‘The girls are fine’, his film blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality to tell the story of a director and four actresses who meet a few summer days in a country house to rehearse a play. The director is Itsaso Arana. The actresses are Barbara Lennie, Irene Escolar, Helena Ezquerro and Itziar Manero. And they all have the same name in fiction as in reality and incorporate their experiences into the film.
In times sick of ironyArana has made a film that claims affection and candor. ‘The girls are fine’ excludes neither pain nor darkness. Among his themes are orphanhood, loss and heartbreak, but there is an express desire to approach them from beauty. “When we were doing the promotion of ‘La virgen de agosto’ we said that it seems that kindness is not in style. And maybe it is. But ‘The girls are fine’ is a type of cinema that is not ironic with the fact of being alive, that it still has faith in the human and who believes that sharing makes us better”, says the filmmaker.
During their stay in the house, the girls live, rehearse and confess to the coolness of the bedrooms and the embrace of the trees. Without fear of clarity, Arana proposes a film in which the friends speak directly about life, death, love and art. The girls confess and, with them, the actresses who play them. Arana goes to a beautiful family memory to explain the confessional nature of his film: “The experience of seeing my dad when he died, with the women of my family around the bed, marked me and gave me another dimension of life. It’s not that I wanted to show that directly, but I wanted to do something with that lesson, with that little wisdom gathered in that moment. This is where the film starts from, and from the desire to portray these friends that I adore”.
Arana’s affection for these women is evident, it shows in the way she listens and looks at them. Not only in that decision to incorporate the memories of the actresses, but also in how she films them or focuses on the way she talks about herself. It is suggestive that this affective gaze does not exclude desire. The beauty of the actresses is expressed without blushing. “I had a kind of complex before showing the film because of that. I thought, will I be understood? There is so much deficit of having told us, so much rage contained with all the reason in the world, we have felt so much shame and rejection, that I understand that a certain way of representing beauty can bother. But I saw my friends and thought, apart from being extremely intelligent, hilarious and talented, they are very beautiful, and I want to give myself the pleasure of portraying them, embellishing them, dignifying them because I know that I am also bringing them to my house and I want to give them a gift”, explains the actress and director.
“I’ve been very careful with that,” Arana confesses. “They were delivering very personal things that have nothing to do with beauty, very deep and hard experiences. But I needed to have that feeling that cinema can be a reality that is three centimeters from the ground. I know that we don’t always get up great, but I didn’t want to give up the seduction and sensuality of the bodies in summer. It was important to me and I don’t think it’s unfeminist. I claim that feminism means not imposing on others the idea of a woman that we have, because we would be falling into the same trap that they have set for us”.
In ‘The girls are fine’, that reality three centimeters from the ground is expressed in the forms of a luminous tale in which there are a mill, a princess and a frog. And in which the girls shake the codes of those traditional stories through words and humor.
Another of the things that makes Arana’s film suggestively out of time is this respect for words: “It is true that the word is a bit maligned in the cinema, but for me it has been something very natural. I have always been shaky and shy, and when I was 20 years old and I saw people speak in public I said: the first thing I have to do to be an adult is learn to speak in public, and by public speaking I meant being able to raise my voice, even if she was shaky, to share what she felt she had to say. For me the word is such a great conquest that it had to be in the film ”
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