2023-09-03 15:00:57
Sometimes a single image contains a movie. For example, that of two women on the banks of a river. They have red painted nails and are sleeping. In those two people, still nameless and without a past, Victor Iriarte knew that there was a story. You just had to find out which one. The image was born four years ago, and it stuck in his head. Around the same time he began “a series of readings and conversations with friends about recent Spanish history and the case of the stolen babies.”
Emma Stone, a sexually liberated feminist Frankenstein in the irregular ‘Poor creatures’ by Yorgos Lanthimos
Further
That “open wound” from Spain’s recent past became the engine of those nameless women of the image that would not go away. Both stimuli were crossed. Those two people were two mothers. One, the biological. The other, the adoptive mother, and they were the embryo of Especially at night, one of the most surprising Spanish films of the year that began its career at the Giornate degli Autore in Venice. Those faces now have the features of Ana Torrent and Lola Dueñas, two of the most mysterious actresses in Spanish cinema, something that perfectly fits this political, authorial film, which mixes the historical story, the robbery film and the drama of free and unclassifiable form.
Iriarte, programmer of the San Sebastian Festival, believes that this film also responds to “a concern that one has regarding recent history, the crimes in Spain, historical memory and how cinema also addresses not only the subject, but also how from the form there is also something that someone who directs has to propose”. The importance of the form to reach the bottom. Or how the form is political. That is why he resorts to the codes of Hollywood film noir or French polar film, added to archive images and elements of melodrama.
A film that is unlike anything else, and that calls into question the exemplary Transition that was sold for so long. “I think that our generation, luckily, is in that memory review, and obviously we understand our parents’ generation and that difficult moment in which they signed with enthusiasm and voted with enthusiasm. But now, 40 years later, when you see those images, which also appear in the form of an archive in our film, you see them from another place because many things have happened and right now we connect it with the precise political moment in Spain, which right now We are talking again about what we are, what model of territories we are…”.
Especially at night “It makes a very direct claim to review something that is a wound.” “The case of stolen babies is still in a very serious legal limbo and we see close examples in the movie. I make that small connection, a bit emotional too, with Argentina, with Chile and with Uruguay. Our film claims that you have to think again, but from a creative place, because I think it also proposes that in these two very different characters who share that they are victims and try to understand each other. And I think that from there I can also make that claim that we have to review our memory, that there be justice, reparation, and that we rethink what we are ”, he adds.
We have to review our memory, that there be justice, reparation, and that we rethink what we are
Víctor Iriarte — Film director
For this, “cinema and popular cinema” is key. That historical memory must be approached from what is told, but also from how it is told. From “the shape”. “I give a lot of importance to that ‘how’. There’s a line from the movie that says, ‘The only thing they haven’t been able to take away from me is my story and how I tell it,’ and I think that’s key.”
There are also echoes of Hitchcock in those two women who dye themselves blonde to hit a blow, something that refers to marnie the thief. “There is something beautiful in that film noir gesture, which is that even though she dyes herself blonde, and at the beginning of the movie she is a brunette, she is still the same woman. There is something that we can relate to Bolaño and to many things that have to do with spies, such as international connections, the mystery, a character in one city, then another, a night call… all this imaginary that for me is very literary, in the Spanish case with Vila-Matas, when he wrote so much about spies at that time when there were those Anagrama novels”, he says about other influences on the film. That costume that is also “a bit of a performative act.” A kind of “ritual, as if you dyed yourself and you were already another person”. “I think we all do it a bit. I’m going to Venice and I’m going to cut my hair… or shave after COVID. Changes that I think are part of who we are.”
In the union of these women, who help each other and find each other, there is also the future to heal the open wounds of Francoism. It could have been a “enemies and revenge” movie, but for Iriarte his friendship is what makes everything move forward, although as in good noir films “there always has to be a tragedy”. Also because “history is tragic and reality is very harsh.” But despite this, there is a claim to “that space for mutual understanding and dialogue” in a film that merges substance and form to offer one of the most original views possible on the historical memory of Spain.
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