Stay and help, endure, manage and give up. Or leave, return to what was built outside, far away. This is the dichotomy that Antonio, the protagonist of Where the silence passesthe first film by Sandra Romero that, after its presentation at the last San Sebastián Festival, arrives in theaters as one of the most unique, personal and exceptional debuts of recent Spanish cinema.
A painful, raw, deeply human and unduplicated breath of fresh air. The filmmaker, who has also directed several episodes of Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s series, the brilliant The new years; In his film, he x-rays what happens when care is not well received and, in turn, what happens when those who care do not receive comfort, relief or tranquility in return.
He does it through Antonio (Antonio Araque), a young man who has to return to his native Écija for Easter after a long time. There he is reunited with his family and his twin brother Javier (Javier Araque), who has a physical disability and needs his support. But helping you is not easy, it is not comforting, it is not kind.
“What interests me most about the film are the family relationships in which there is tremendous dependence and love, but also unbearable violence,” its director explains to elDiario.es. “Especially when a member is sick,” which is the reality he explores in his debut film. For Javier, who also suffers from more than one illness, this has an immediate consequence both on his relationship with himself and with his loved ones.
Given this context, the possibility of deciding to “distancing” opens up: “There is a very deep dependence and love here is a requirement.” Sandra Romero herself made the decision to do it in her real life, also from Écija, where she met the protagonists of her film, who are her friends in real life, although the story she has written is fictional. The director was in her early twenties – she is now 31 – when she packed her bags and moved to Madrid to fulfill her dream: studying film. His mother, who suffered from schizophrenia, continued to live in his house: “She locked herself in a room and decided not to come out again until she died.”
“There is a person who chooses to isolate himself [como le ocurre al personaje de Javier en la película]but at the same time you wonder, to what extent is he choosing it? To what extent is the illness what pushes you to do it?” says Sandra Romero. The helplessness generated by the fact that what may end up becoming the ‘best’ option is for the sick person to distance themselves from their environment is one of the conflicts reflected in the feature film.
Partly due to the lack of state support they have. “In our case, it took us years for a psychiatrist to come and try to get my mother out of the house, because there was no way,” he recalls. “There is no means for someone professional to come and sit down with that person again and again to get them out of the hole. At a structural level, I did not feel that there was any help for me or my family,” he criticizes, comparing his experience with what has been captured in the script of his debut film. “What we were able to achieve on some occasions was to go to a judge to try to force her to make a mental health admission, or readjust a medication that was still palliative. It was more so that it wouldn’t be a nuisance than so that it would be okay. “They are people who are condemned,” he acknowledges.
Being sick does not make you docile
One of the great discoveries of Sandra Romero’s cinema is that, while she is able to dissect the complexity of her characters, she avoids issuing any type of judgment. The reality she portrays is uncomfortable, because it does not have, as she herself reflects, “a better or worse solution”, and therefore the behavior of Antonio, Javier and María (the third sister) is at the same time understandable, reprehensible and the extensive etcetera of reactions that a human being can provoke being as he is, the best he can, despite every circumstance that gets in his way. Nobody is blameless, uncritical, infallible or constant.
“Many times we have the image that the sick person is totally manageable, that he goes wherever you tell him. And no, they are people with all the complexity that people have, at the same time with problems that make them trigger,” describes the author of Where the silence passeswhich points out: “They are completely independent in the emotional sense. You can’t force anyone to be well if that person doesn’t feel like they can be, because it’s good for you and you can be calmer.” That is why they are such difficult situations to manage, and hence the double merit of having been able to capture it with the naturalness and verisimilitude that Sandra Romero’s cinema breathes and exudes. “They are much more common realities than we think,” he warns.
Dependency – and its perversion – is one of the great themes of the film, which is exemplified by the character of Javier, by which he himself generates. “He has tremendous tenderness, he goes without masks. Love and violence are triggered in him in a completely direct way, and there is something about that personality that really engages those around him,” he points out. The filmmaker feels that this type of identity “makes you have the hope that you will always be able to find that tenderness in her, and many times you forget the violence until you face it again.”
“In a small place, where your groups of friends are the same, it is difficult to go out because you think you will have their tenderness and loyalty, in such a way that you end up normalizing violence and often accepting it,” he reflects. That is why for her it was key for the film that Antonio’s character left and returned, since it was the way to say that “that violence is not acceptable.”
María, the sister, is not the only one who continues to live in Écija, there are the parents (played by Mona Martínez and Nicolás Montoya), although completely overwhelmed by their son’s ailments: “They have given up and have not known how to deal with their children . I feel that many times love cannot do everything and that is very painful, both in siblings and parents, there is guilt for not having known how to change something that is already very difficult to change.”
That place called town
The film takes place entirely in Écija, the scene of processions, discussions, family meals, parties, sexual encounters, drug exchanges, haircuts, birthdays and friendships. Everything takes place in this space in which the filmmaker was clear that she did not want to “neither demonize the town nor generate an image of paradise, which is what often happens.”
“Towns are just as organized as cities. They are the same, but simply different in size and access,” he says. “In mine there was no bookstore where you could buy a book, nor a cinema where you could go see a Fernando Franco movie.” [director de La herida y La consagración de la primavera]. This type of access generates a tendency to drink from the age of thirteen to have fun, just as in Madrid people at thirteen can choose between drinking or going to the movies. We didn’t have that, but at the same time we had a certain freedom with which one does not live in cities,” he elaborates. All to reach the conclusion that the towns “are neither paradises nor hells. It can be both depending on the person.”
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