Pilar Palomero observes with a naturalistic gaze and documentary spirit a minor who has been a mother, although more dramatic substance is missing to reach two hours
If there were an ‘applause meter’ at the press conferences, ‘La Maternal’ would win the Golden Shell. The second film by Pilar Palomero, who last year won four Goyas with ‘Las Niñas’, including those for best film and new direction , was received with emotion and sympathy. Much of the blame lay with the presence of non-professional actresses, whose true stories feed the script. Except for the protagonist, Carla Quílez, discovered on Instagram by the director, and Ángela Cervantes, who plays her mother, the rest are or were teenage mothers.
‘La Maternal’ takes its title from the Barcelona shelter where a 14-year-old girl ends up getting pregnant. In the first scene, she watches porn on her cell phone with her friend while they laugh. Angry and rebellious, she drinks and plays soccer, breaks into a house and is about to enter the field of juvenile delinquency in the town of Los Monegros, where her mother runs a dilapidated restaurant next to the highway where the trucks.
Palomero opts for a naturalistic look in the portrait of a teenager brimming with rage. Attached to the cell phone like any girl her age, Carla never goes to high school, puts up with a mother who doesn’t seem to be much older than her and only feels free dancing trap and reggaeton in videos posted on social media.
A slapstick protagonist
In the reception center she will meet other girls with much harsher stories than her own: mistreatment, sexual abuse, suicide attempts, eating disorders, drugs… The director drew the subject of the story from her conversations with pregnant minors. Five of these girls act in the film, although they do not play themselves. At times, ‘La Maternal’ looks like a documentary, but it isn’t. The shots were repeated and the protagonists interpreted a script.
“I want to have a baby because it is the only person who is going to be with me,” is heard in the film. Pilar Palomero wants us to empathize with a protagonist who can be slapped at the beginning, in which little by little we will successively understand her anger, bewilderment, vertigo and fear of her. Truffaut argued that children who do not receive love at home end up looking for it elsewhere. And Carla finds it in the patients responsible for the reception center and in girls who, like her, are not yet ready to be mothers.
The songs by Estopa and C. Tangana give a suburban, neighborhood air to a chronicle that falters as it stretches up to two hours. There comes a time when more dramatic chicha is missed in the comings and goings to the center of the protagonist, who can’t stand the baby’s cries. Palomero also wants us to look with different eyes at the character of her mother, who was abandoned on her day by the man who got her pregnant.
If ‘Las Niñas’ explored the sentimental memory of Spain in 1992 through the eyes of a girl, the director’s own alter ego, ‘La Maternal’ proposes an abrupt way of saying goodbye to adolescence in a feminine universe in the that men are not present. Now that films are judged by the seriousness of their themes and not by their cinematographic values, she has everything to succeed in San Sebastián.
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