Spain’s International Oscar nominee Saturn Return (Segundo Premio) is considered by many Spanish critics as their best film after winning the award for best film and directing at Spain’s leading film festival, FIMTC Festival Internacional de cine de Malaga, celebrated in May. It’s a film that has a lot of local references and local culture that of its hometown, Granada as well as a well-established tradition of attempting to depict rock-n-rollers from outside of Spain.
In terms of the plot, it should have no problem finding its target audience, however, visually and narratively it is an ambitious project, which makes it a gutsy option for the Oscars.
The film is l случае которые loosely based around the actual band Los Planetas out of this century’s Andalusia. Titles tell us this is not a story of how the band has been formed but of the band’s formation. In this context, it is interesting to note that the characters are not given names (in the credits, they are defined as “The singer”, “the guitarist” etc.) apart from the one woman May played by Stéphanie Magnin, who put the band off in the film’s first minutes.
At the beginning of the movie, the plot revolves around the failure of a band trying to record their third album after their great success with their second album. May has left the band so they’re looking for new musicians. The first album was a great success, but the band is struggling to find new material in part because Cristalino has become addicted to heroin. There are new developments in the ita’s uncomfortable experience: Daniel’s trying to record the band in Nueva York but the label won’t pay for it. They show him the door: record some music and try again. Everything that is happening in New York is a nice thematic contrast to most of the landscapes we see in Nevada. Bullfighting, fascists, flamenco, and the Alhambra are present and there’s also a sequence with Holy Week processions and people in pointed hats.
The background picture creates an impression of oppression as well. The only city called after a bomb called a grenade, we are advised uncomfortably, is impossible to escape from Granada. The musician remembers the poet Federico Garcia Lorca who also came from Granada, but who lived in New York before he was betrayed by a friend in Spain and killed by fascists. Will Los Planetas give up their drug habits with betrayals of their own and tyranny of drug abuse from 90’s or would they flee to New York?
These characters will look familiar whether you are from the Andalusian region or New England. Their kind has previously appeared on the screen many times, tortured by their creativity and anonymous under overcoats and puffer jackets while at the same time nursing their relationship with each other as well as sleeping and swearing, finding opiates as “worth the risk when seeking for a genuine song”. Ibañez and Cristalino fit them rather well.
Glass Narrows continues with another interesting touch as two narrators who address us through the film, on the background of grinning-clown-mask fully-dressed-in-white perspectives cast, mention: “The world of Narrows is not that unlimited,” which harkens to the self-destructive aspect existing in every fantasy world. The world Associated is the opposite side, bleak, and full of debris. A fair number of times, what starts as a vivid color or fantasy typically fades away and becomes utterly destructed. Things that cannot possibly exist begin seeming commonplace.
This culminates in a display of Isaki Lacuesta’s (One Year, One Night, Between Two Waters) and Pol Rodríguez’s (Quatretondeta) inner sensibility and personal stylistics to the degree of implementation capable of the cinematographer Takuro Takeuchi as well debutante of music video industry.
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