Fathers and mothers in a fight, desolate children. Breakups that trigger resentment, tension, revenge. Even hiding places, lies and prohibitions towards children, related to the bond, attitude and love of the other towards them. “Your father doesn’t love you.” And it may be so. Or maybe not.
Manuel Martín Cuenca has entered with Andrea’s love, his seventh feature-length fiction film, on a tricky topic that is unfortunately the order of the day: toxic fathers and mothers. But from the most unique, risky and surely noble tone and style. Not a scream in the entire movie. Silences, conversations with timid voices, crestfallen glances. Dryness within transcendence. Not a drop of melodrama. Not a tear, not a bad gesture. Only the emotional and silent abandonment of three children, a high school teenager and two children. A girl who takes charge of raising her little brothers while the mother works and walks through life with bitterness as her flag, also with them, and the father has rebuilt his existence with a second family after having stopped paying the pension. and not wanting to know anything about yours.
The stripping of melodramatic elements by Martín Cuenca is almost total. Narrow format, the classic 4:3, to further imprison the kids, despite being set in a setting as attractive as the streets and beaches of the city of Cádiz, here less loud and lively than ever. The point of view always remains on the eldest daughter, and some of the sequences that other filmmakers would have considered dramatic axes of the story are not even shown, due to the parents’ trial. Even more so, when he finally delves into the explanations, into deep and key dialogues for the family’s situation, the case of the judge’s interrogation of the daughter, its staging based on close-ups of the adult listening, composed of in a sober, almost unsightly way, they demonstrate the director’s avoidance of any tearful fuss. As a culmination, the ellipses and the resource of off-screen cinematographic language (the main action takes place outside the eye of the camera) dominate a work of such austerity, that it is not by chance that specialists will repeatedly compare it with the cinema of the Frenchman Robert Bresson.
The choice of non-professional performers to compose the roles completes an exercise in expressive restraint that the author of works such as The Weakness of the Bolshevik (2003) and bad seasons (2005) had never taken it to these extremes, not even in Half of Oscar (2010) and Cannibal (2013), two laconic dramas with rough danger, that exploded from the inside but never overflowed outwards. After the notable The author (2017) and The daughter (2021), led by an actor as powerful as Javier Gutiérrez, the turn towards abstinence from any luxury by Martín Cuenca is a symptom of courage, personality and serenity.
The desperate silent darkness of the father and the family poisoning of the mother, of those parents who will end up saying that they have their reasons for behaving in such a way, is contrasted with the simple luminosity of the kids, punctuated by the Havana-tinged soundtrack of Vetusta. Morla. Andrea’s love, recently awarded at the Tallinn festival (one of the 15 class A in the world) with the awards for best direction and best script, it is nothing more (nor less) than the wish of a daughter, with more common sense than her elders , to know what is happening. That she faces her while they turn their back. The search for a generous gaze, expressed from the frank perspective of a filmmaker.
As they say in a History class at your high school, the requirement of fides, the Roman moral virtue consisting of applying loyalty, good faith and trust with those in your charge. And too many times it is forgotten.
Andrea’s love
Address: Manuel Martín Cuenca.
Performers: Lupe Mateo Barredo, Irka Lugo, Jesús Ortiz, Fidel Sierra.
Gender: drama. Spain, 2023.
Duration: 101 minutes.
Premiere: November 24.
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