When Andrea Jaurrieta (Pamplona, 38 years old) gets going, it seems like a train that is impossible to stop. She sneaked into a Goya party in 2015 and ran into Ingrid García Jonsson: “she told me that she had nothing and I gave her my script.” So she found a leading lady for her first film, Ana by day (2018), which he carried out with very little money, with a lot of determination. This Friday her second feature film hits theaters, Little girl, born with the same drive although with more economic slack, without giving up creatively, and betting on a cinema “far from naturalism.” “I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it’s not my thing,” he says. Abuse, revenge, the color red and a Gene Tierney with a shotgun who returns to her town in search of physical and moral revenge. Between Hitchcock and touches of Almodóvar, Jaurrieta opts for something rarely seen in Spanish cinema.
The time has changed. In case it was announced that she was a candidate for new director at the 2019 Goya, at that moment Jaurrieta went down to Mantequerías Andrés, a classic Madrid grocery store next to her house, and bought a bottle of cheap cider that she put on display. cool. “I wasn’t flush with money, but I was very excited,” she recalls. “Over the years I have made more expensive purchases, to, for example, give a gift, but I still can’t afford to go to dinner with champagne,” she confesses with a laugh. ”In return, I have made the film I wanted, and that makes me proud. During this process I have received a commission and I rejected it because I was not interested. Not because it was commissioned, but because I respect cinema, because I get so involved in each project that if I didn’t feel it was mine, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I don’t make churros, I don’t produce in a chain. Fortunately I have had producers who have accompanied me in my creative freedom, although what has been difficult has been raising the financing.” Because? “Because movies like that go outside the norm, and in the face of that you either return to the fold or you stay in a fixed gear.”
Jaurrieta fights against stereotypes such as that cinema directed by women has to be naturalistic, battles against reality such as that the budgets of films directed by female directors are lower than those of films by men. “It would seem that we can only make girls’ films in villages. Or with shots of girls putting their heads together in bed. What is this image of sorority? We fall into a cliché that I don’t believe in. I feel identified with characters like Ana, who tried to break with herself and that is why she fell into darkness. Or in this, that she already comes with darkness inside of her. Obviously I don’t support violence, but if Nina carries a weapon, we will have to play on that ground.”
Jaurrieta defends films like 20,000 species of bees either Alcarras. “I love them, what I’m saying is that it can’t necessarily be our genre. We’ve been watching men’s films about men or women all our lives, and I’m supposed to take the hint in that cinema. Okay, maybe. However, don’t force me to lock myself into a genre, because that is a method of control, of not letting us leave a zone. I make films and I will deal with the issues that concern me and from my point of view, and obviously they are going to be related to women because it is my point of view, but I don’t have to make the same films.”
Hence, Jaurrieta’s references for a neowestern as Little girl delve deeper into the melodrama and the thriller. “The play on which I am based, by José Ramon Fernández, who was my teacher and gave it to me because he sensed that I was looking for material of that style, is more about the love relationship, like Seagull, the original inspiration,” he points out. “It is curious how in the editing the film has grown like thriller and has moved away from melodrama.”
The color and figure of Gene Tierney in May heaven judge her, and in general the cinema of Douglas Sirk, of course Alfred Hitchcock and Pedro Almodóvar, the small body of Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar and his handling of weapons. “Red is king, right. She herself is bleeding, not only emotionally, but literally. She is broken. I fought so that there were no clothes with prints, so that we would get closer to the Technicolor. The film is full of symbolic layers, and the red comes from there, of course. Furthermore, it contrasts with the green of the grass, the earth and the blue of the sea,” he explains.
Jaurrieta worked with Pedro Almodóvar in Juliet (2016), and there, he says, he learned a lot. “I remember one day Almodóvar choosing the one he wanted from among twenty fountain pens, and he looked very carefully for a long time, until he picked up one and did not say that it was the one he liked, but asked out loud: ‘How Emma will have this one [Suárez] in the hand?’. That clicked in my head.”
And the western, a sacrosanct genre that enjoys Jaurrieta’s movements. “We are here to play and subvert, right?” When Nina enters the bar, like the stranger pushing the swinging doors in the Wild West, she finds not only the drunks on duty, but also a mother complaining about her children. “Change of their usual gender to someone who was abandoned in the town, or to someone who is dedicated to caring… And the motive of revenge is completely contemporary. Let’s say that the elements of the western, like that quiet people in complicit silence who have not taken sides between the aggressor and the attacked, are there but agitated and turned around,” she laughs.
Revenge comes from sexual abuse. It is heard up to three times in Little girl that the teenager is “almost 16 years old,” the minimum legal age that allows sexual relations that are considered consensual. “True, although beyond the legal there is the moral. She is a girl dazzled by a famous writer who has moved to that town on the coast, and although he may believe that he has fallen in love, he is the adult, he should understand that at that age you want to eat your life, explore, you have a lot of illusions and it is easy for them to derail you. Nina is an easy target due to a moral deficit born from the bad relationship with her father, and the interesting thing is that she does want that relationship, for the plot to advance through gray terrain, for him to not be a typical predator. In both eras, the writer is played by Darío Grandinetti. “And with him I worked on that facet, that of falling in love, because on many occasions the aggressors themselves are not aware of what they have done.” And he concludes: “I cannot conceive that they do not realize the other person’s pain or that what they do is immoral. I suspect that they are very sure of themselves and very supported by the social structure.”
The adult Nina is given a face by Patricia López Arnaiz, who enters with a shotgun in hand, after decades without having set foot on that ground, emboldened until memories and the place weaken her. “I also convinced Patricia with the script in hand. “She has perfectly constructed Nina’s physical and moral illness, her crushing in that town and her struggle to stay afloat,” notes the filmmaker. “It’s curious, because the writer played with the teenager to be his muse, an area in which very unequal age relationships have historically been allowed, and Nina has ended up being an actress, a kind of muse,” and a job that allows flee to other lives.
And, in the end, has Jaurrieta done any more crazy things to move forward? Little girl? “I don’t know if it’s crazy, but one day I chartered a bus to bring people from my town to act as extras in the procession sequence. You can even see my parents. And other things I can’t tell,” she says, pointing to the recorder. “Me, when I grow up…”
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