There are stories that are lived and others that survive in the limbo of maybes, of maybes, of what could have been. There are also those that survive stuck in a fictitious, imaginary present, until someone picks them up and puts verbs, nouns, looks, places, music on them; and suddenly what a generation had written in its head materializes on the screen. It is titled ‘The New Years’, and is directed (along with Paula Fabra and Sara Cano) by Rodrigo Sorogoyen. Life in this case begins on New Year’s Eve 2015, you know, boy meets girl, or the other way around. One has a birthday on December 31st and another on January 1st. They have just entered their thirties. She is lost and he wants to get lost. From there, Sorogoyen visits them again from New Year’s Eve to New Year’s Eve, ten in total, which are ten years of life in which all those possible lives fit that begin at 30 and end when the gray hairs already appear. Sorogoyen takes all the clichés that self-proclaimed independent cinema has filmed in the last decade and shows that what is needed is neither more budget nor more weeks of filming, but a very well-rounded script, staging that is precise to the point of exhaustion and a « calligraphy” with the camera (as that person would say) as precise as it is subtle. Francesco Carril suddenly does not seem like the Francesco Carril of Jonás Trueba’s films and Iria del Río appears with a freshness as if he had not appeared before in a dozen series. Even Benjamín Prado seems like an actor with a sublime role as his father. “Today is going to be the longest night of the year, and I am going to live it with love and absurdity,” sings Nacho Vegas at the end of the first chapter, the first New Year’s Eve of the protagonists, which will be infinite even when it ends. “I’m going to invent a plan, to escape, forward,” Standstill recites monotone in another scene, in another stage. And McEnroe sounds, of course, because in bad times you have to return to Ricardo Lezón’s cave. And they shout ‘Damn sweetness’, which is an ode to a romantic ideal that not even the romantics who got out of the way could stand. And with The Postal Service they discover that there is a love that “sounds and is lived like in a movie” while they ‘die in love’ listening to La bien querida. And they try to get out of the loop but Iván Ferreiro starts singing that ‘Thought is circular’. And Holgado sounds, “this was your colleague, right?” And they have to dance, of course, and they jump to Joe Twilight’s techno, and they go to Berlin but with all the reproaches that The Killer Swing said he didn’t want. And they wonder in the dark of the night ‘How deep is your love? ‘, dance anthem and ‘buenrollero’ that asks for water for dry mouths. And they get gray hair and get older, and that now means having to put up with Rodrigo Cuevas, “who you didn’t like before but since he won the National Prize you do because you want to continue being modern.” In short, you fall in love, because you’ve been there. “I’m fine. Bad. Good. Life,” says Francesco Carril, the protagonist, to Iria del Río, the protagonist. Total, lives. All different, all the same.
#Fernando #Muñoz #lives #Sorogoyen
