“Against the current of much of current cinema.” The voice of Manuel Martín Cuenca (El Ejido, 58 years old) sounds emphatic. He has never been a modest filmmaker in his statements. But now he sounds so happy with his latest work, Andrea’s love —which is released in commercial theaters after winning the awards for best direction and script at the Tallinn festival (Estonia), one of the 15 in the world in class A, as tired of the prevailing auteur cinema. “The cinema that interests me, the one that I think reaches the public, is the one that is created along the way, in which there is space and echo for the filmmaker. Not the one done with a square and a bevel, the one that comes from the journey of the script and the projects through different festival or production laboratories,” he explains. “Come on, he who reigns.”
Added to this is a consideration about the image that adolescents and working mothers are given in cinema and, extrapolatingly, in society. “The film was born in the pandemic. When we were leaving confinement, I remember an announcement in which teenagers were warned that because of their behavior, that is, for going out to party, they could kill their grandparents,” she recalls, raising her voice. “Most teenagers are not like that. They are often portrayed as mentally retarded, who cut their wrists, take drugs or are raped by their parents. People will tell you that’s not the case. Of course these cases exist, but they are the extreme symptom, and we show them on the screen because of the morbidity. My Andrea is 15 years old, and she takes care of her little brothers because her mother works. Is that a tragedy? No, it’s life. The mother loves them, she has not abandoned them, they simply have to earn a salary. I insist, it is life,” she says. Hence her Andrea is not a joke, she is simply a girl who wants to find out why her father abandoned them, and she embarks on an adventure, with her two brothers as squires, to find him. and understand him.
For this reason, the filmmaker argues, “Andrea grows and matures precisely in that process of search and encounter and acceptance, of lucidity. I want to reclaim the normality of everyday life, the warmth and sincerity of the usual gaze of children and adolescents. They do not usually have toxic dynamics, like those that have led to the separation of Andrea’s parents. I was like that girl, worried about my things, about affection, about finding my place in the world, reading books or writing in a notebook, going to the beach, and the current portrait of youth is generally horrendous. He points out other personal echoes, such as that at 13 years old, and being the youngest son, his parents sent him to live in Granada with his brothers. “They are life circumstances.” Or how his recent fatherhood has marked the future of the film: “Yes, more in the final tone, because it is the film that I wanted to make before I knew I was going to be a father.”
About toxic relationships, and specifically about toxic masculinity, Andrea’s love delves into different men. “Andrea’s friend is as pure as she is. He is another wise teenager searching for his place in the world. On the other hand, his father is lost, he is incapable. Although we don’t know exactly why the marriage broke up. And not even if he is a good or bad person. I like the character of Andrea’s teacher, who because of the wristband he wears with the Spanish flag we know that he is at the ideological opposite of the teenager, who in turn wears the Republican flag. That teacher, of the same age as her parent, asks her if there is anything wrong with her, if she can help him with something, a very nice question.”
Martín Cuenca adds action to theoretical reflection. For example, he moves to live in the places where he shoots: “Because I don’t want to fall into the cliché. With Andrea’s love I lived for a year in Cádiz, I moved to Jaén when The daughter, and in other movies, too. It helps you not fall into traps. Look, when I started writing the script with Lola Mayo I didn’t know, for example, that children cannot enter into a lawsuit between their parents. There was a sketch of a sequence like that and it fell apart. In exchange, something much more interesting arose: leaving them outside, in the hallway of the court, letting the camera stay with them and not knowing what they are discussing in court.”
![Manuel Martín Cuenca, during the filming of 'El amor de Andrea'.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/E9oGACrYoB8skzAuvFCGGUIflfQ=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/4VBLGYXZGVAWLNOPTT24TCDTRI.jpg)
Having said the above, Martín Cuenca knows that he has been refining his work, that since he started with The Weakness of the Bolshevik (2003) and bad seasons (2005), passing through the already austere Half of Oscar (2010) and Cannibal (2013), and after his two collaborations with the actor Javier Gutiérrez, in The author (2017) and in The daughter (2021), its staging has mutated. “Now I know that when filming I extract the raw material for each film, and that in it you summon the energy, you fight to find that little miracle. As if you gathered around the fire and invoked the spirits. It’s not every day that you get the big sequence, but you have to continually invoke it,” she reflects.
Therefore, the filmmaker does not storyboards: “In each sequence I shoot the shots in chronological order, because depending on how you film one, it leads you to another. Works? OK. I avoid what they call intellectualization of the film. Howard Hawks said that a masterpiece is five great sequences, and the rest is boom, boom, boom [el cineasta golpe una mano sobre otra, para acentuar la rapidez]. Or that there is only one way to film a man entering through a door and that is… to film a man entering through a door.” And he takes off. “Yes, I feel more and more alone, although I am not the last one left: you see the documentary about the filming of Alcarras in the DVD extras, which talks about the construction of that fictional family, and you understand why the film is so good and that Carla Simón makes a similar cinematographic search.”
![Manuel Martín Cuenca, with actress Lupe Mateo Barredo on the filming of 'El amor de Andrea'.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/BT3O1D2K_qm68z67Y_cFcBak544=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/VIEV2SJP6NHC7NUPWWX5DG5BKI.jpg)
The talk returns to its beginning, to what the audience can expect from this drama: “During the first 20 minutes you don’t understand much of what the film is about. Who are they? What is the movie about? We are too used to having everything thrown at us in the first minute. Well, let’s break the rules, let’s go against the scriptwriting manuals.” This entails two risks, the creative and the commercial. With a smile of resignation, Martín Cuenca points out: “In short, everything is very difficult.”
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