Teresa of Ávila was a virtuous cook who enjoyed feeding the other nuns. In the frame Teresa in the kitchen, The baroque painter Francisco Rizi focuses on that image of domestic mysticism compared to those of the saint with a notebook and pen by Ribera and Zurbarán. The idea of the kitchen as the setting for her spiritual experience (Teresa said: “The Lord walks among the pots”) has been explored by artist Marina Abramovic in The Kitchen. Homage to Saint Theresefrom 2009, and by the playwright Juan Mayorga, who placed his work in that same space The tongue in pieces (2013 National Prize for Dramatic Literature). Inspired in The book of life, It represented the dialectical duel between the writer and the inquisitor who pursued the closure of her first foundation, the convent of San José, and Teresa’s return to Orthodoxy.
Paula Ortiz’s new film is built on those words, the intense Teresa, which proposes an intricate and difficult struggle between image and text and in which the convent kitchen becomes the scene of a process that judges the imaginative flight of the saint before a Church that rejects her singularity. A theological and personal judgment that moves between excess and the direct, almost translucent face of a magnetic Blanca Portillo, capable of transmitting without apparent effort all the power of her trance in front of the inquisitor whom Asier Etxeandia brings to life with more enthralled forms. .
After approaching the Lorca universe in Girlfriend and, this same year, an autumnal Ernest Hemingway in On the other side of the river and among the trees, Paula Ortiz (a philologist by training) once again shows her desire to reinterpret the classics of literature in a film that proposes an ultra-sensory aesthetic experience that, in its most tortuous and delirious area, runs aground in its excesses. The Teresa by Paula Ortiz has three ages, with Greta Fernández in the role of the young novice. Through the interrogation in the convent kitchen we learn about that past and the Church’s obsession with her purity: her paternal family, from Toledo, were converts, and her grandfather, a rich wool and silk merchant, ended up indicted.
Teresa It goes from the light of childhood to the sensuality of youth and the gothic darkness of maturity. A journey from the book-loving girl to the conceited and sick young woman to, finally, try to understand the mystery of the adult woman who is now a writer. Between allegorical images, Ortiz boldly deploys her visual rhetoric, although she does not always mix well, especially when the saint-inquisitor duel errs on pomp and goes too intense.
Teresa
Address: Paula Ortiz.
Interpreters: Blanca Portillo, Asier Etxeandia, Greta Fernández, Ainet Jounou.
Gender: drama. Spain, 2023.
Duration: 100 minutes.
Premiere: November 24.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Teresa #judgment #delirium #mystical #kitchen #Blanca #Portillo #Paula #Ortiz