2023-05-20 13:31:39
Sex is still somewhat uncomfortable. For some, even dirty or sinful. Everything related to the body and what surrounds it seems condemned to be hidden, spoken between whispers. What generates that taboo is frustration, misunderstanding. What is not talked about does not exist, and therefore it seems the exception. Children are punished when they begin to show the first instinctive symptoms of interest. That ‘don’t rub’, or ‘don’t touch yourself’ that parents say to their children. They never approach that situation from the natural, or the didactic, but from the prohibitive.
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Those traumas about female sexuality told with intelligence, brilliance and a lot of risk, are what the director Elena Martín puts at the center of her story, who after surprising with Julia Is has released his second film, Creature, in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, the same place where the phenomenon began last year Water, by Elena López Riera. Martín’s proposal, in which he stars and writes the script together with Clara Roquet -author of Freedom- it is to speak of that repressed sexuality in a woman in three different stages. The adult, where all of the above has caused a rejection of sex with her partner; adolescence, where you pressure them towards what a young woman at that age should do, mark their relationships; and childhood.
It is in this part where the film takes a leap without a net that brings to the table issues and approaches that are never discussed. That sexuality in a girl who begins to discover her body and that she receives the first castrating orders. A girl who learns by imitation gestures that she then repeats with her father. A parent-child relationship marked by gender dynamics that are always ignored. A mature, complex and very risky script that has made Cannes overwhelmed by clarity and courage. Female sexuality has conquered the festival for a few hours.
A film from was born from an idea that Elena Martín had “more than five years ago” in a script that has taken a long time, because they always had the maxim of “escape from more conventional structures and look for the breadth that the film has”. An idea that was born from a performance that she did with some friends. There they began to “share experiences in relation to desire and the body.” A subject that she was already interested in and that led her to “investigate child sexuality”. A very strong documentation process that led to a fiction that “could open debate.” “In that process with my friends I realized that it was something very little talked about. It was a challenge, but I am very happy with how it turned out. I think that we have been very demanding along the way so as not to fall into looking for a conflict, an outcome and a moment that was very climatic or effective, but that we have really tried to be faithful to the search ”, says the director about her film.
Some repressions that Elena Martín has discovered, in the first projections, that it is intergenerational. “One of the last shows was with people who were not dedicated to cinema, or not directly, and there was a 70-year-old woman and there were some 15-year-olds. And I asked them if they had felt represented by the film and They all answered yes. And the 70-year-old woman said “it’s just the way it is.” The portrait of this adolescence is that of my adolescence, and I thought, how strong that this has not changed ”, she points out.
What we try to tell in the film is that this repression comes from the fact that you have experienced repression and you have fears and taboos, and a way of reading physical contact
Elena Martin
— Director of ‘Creature’
In the childhood part, he addresses those relationships with his father, a topic he really wanted to talk about, since during the interview process to build the script, many women “talked about the strange relationship they had with their parents, Like a relationship of attraction and rejection. We were researching a lot about this and in the end it is this thing so strong that it is difficult to relate when the children grow up for fear that a situation could be misinterpreted. This creates a very strong elephant in the room.”
Martín believes that the current generations of mothers and fathers are the first to verbalize questions about the early stages of their children’s sexuality, and he considers it key. “What we try to tell in the film is that this repression comes from the fact that you have experienced repression and you have some fears and some taboos, and you have a way of reading physical contact that has connotations that a child does not put, but rather who have taught us that to protect children is to scare them. As a society we don’t want to cross the line, but we don’t want to be self-conscious either, so what’s in between? How can we re-educate ourselves to be able to better accompany all this and at the same time protect? Because one thing does not take away the other, ”he settles.
Creature is, once again, the confirmation of a new generation of directors who dare to look at other issues and do it in a different way. A generation that also helps each other in the creative processes by forming a support network that makes the projects grow: “For me it is very nice that this happens and it excites me a lot. I even want to cry every time I think about this, because in the process of this film all the colleagues have helped me a lot since Belén Funes. Irene Morey reading the script, Celia Giraldo, Leticia Dolera, who was also very present… For casting and rehearsal issues with the children, I consulted things with Carla Simón, Pilar Palomero came to a show, and was able to give her opinion… and I’m talking about directors, but there are also editors who have helped us in the process. I’m sure I leave people here now, but I have a sense of community and that if one is doing well, the others are doing well too, considering how cruel this industry is, because it is and it doesn’t always work.” .
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