The story would have liked Fox in its heyday, probably Warner too: a man placid to the point of meekness, armed only with his determination, ready to challenge a country and the ruling power to make his idea triumph. Which naturally at the service of progress and the weakest. A perfect melodrama and even at risk of consolation, if the character chosen by director Fernando Trueba for his latest film hadn’t lived in Medelln (Colombia), in years dramatically marked by blood and violence. Because at the center of Our history there is the doctor Hctor Abad Gmez (Javier Cmara), protagonist of the fight in favor of public health for the poorest classes of his city (starting with a massive vaccination campaign against polio) and champion of the rights of the weakest, who to the point of clashing, not only in health but also politically, with a conservative bloc that did not have many scruples in fighting those who opposed it. And that his son Quinquin told in a very successful book at home (and beyond), The oblivion that we will be (Einaudi translated it in Italy), starting from a verse attributed to Borges, The oblivion that we will be, which is also the original title of the film and which we will hear from Cmara at the very end of the film (if you can, prefer the original version with subtitles).
Indeed, the choice of the book as a starting point can help to understand the choice made by the screenplay (written by the director’s brother, David) to broaden his narrative field, crossing the professional and political history of Abad Gmez with the family and private one. Indeed, the latter appears to the viewer as the privileged ground on which to measure the impact and consequences of his medical choices. Also offering an opportunity to reshuffle the chronological line of the film that jumps from 1983 back to 1971 and then back to the Eighties, with the distant past filmed in color and the one closest to us instead in black and white. As if to underline the coldness, if not the rawness of years dominated by blood and violence (and which Sergio Ivn Castao’s photography returns with icy and anti-empathic images).
In this plant it belongs to his son Hctor called Quinquin (Juan Pablo Urrego when he was twenty, Nicols Reyes Cano when he was a teenager) the task of acting not so much as a narrator but as a counterpoint to his father, first with his curiosity then with his hostility to life choices that he reads as selfish: to the parent who wants to explain his daily toil in favor of the weakest with a Japanese proverb (instead of cursing the darkness, turn on a little light), he replies piqued that the only light I see here is your vanity. which he will have the opportunity to change his mind (even writing the book he dedicated to his father), but which is functional to the choice of not only telling the paladin who fights for the most unfortunate but also the father of the family, with an understanding wife (Patricia Tamayo ) and five daughters who in the narration function as a choir to be entrusted with a kind of counterpoint. Especially when one of them, Marta (Kami Zea), collides with a tragic illness.
This choice avoids the traps of the more hagiographic melodrama (Hollywood-style) but which sometimes ends up losing the sense of the narrative, introducing pauses that also risk slowing down (and lengthening) the pace of the film. As if the director wanted to embrace too many things, forcing himself to say everything. Where, on the other hand, Trueba knows how to center in the way – never didactic – in which he brings out the lay and tolerant spirit of Dr. Abad Gmez (see the presence of the nurse Josefa), the type of anti-ideological commitment that confidence in the little lights to be left on that not even his political defeat (if this dramatic euphemism will allow us) managed to extinguish.
June 13, 2021 (change June 16, 2021 | 10:22)
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