SECOND PRIZE
- Direction: Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez
- Screenplay: Isaki Lacuesta and Fernando Navarro
- Cast: Daniel Ibáñez, Cristalino, Stephanie Magnin, Mafo, Eduardo Rejón
“This is not a movie about the Planets”, they insist. As if we would believe it, I can admit that opening line feels like a 10-second publicity maneuver. The film doesn’t pretend to be a typical biopic, the kind that stages a famous singer in a formulaic, codified way to celebrate a cult band’s place in the pantheon. “Second Prize” reorients the rock unit toward a fictional universe, but the off-screen narrations from multiple viewpoints weave a structure that feels almost documentary. So, without a clear label, the film ends up being several things at once.
In a sense, this movie inherits some of the narrative tricks seen in Isaki Lacuesta’s earlier work, Un año, una noche, with its puzzle-like, fragmentary structure and dizzying temporal leaps. In its first hour, the film asks viewers to wade through a wave of stylistic propositions. Some work brilliantly, some land with brutal precision, others miss the mark. Deliberately chaotic—driven by the potential to explore the identity voids of people rising to fame while wrestling with the reasons behind it, and the psychedelic recesses that camouflage their personal lives—the collaboration of Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez blends into a sea of metaphors, dreamlike sequences, juxtaposed shots, and a bold four-teens format that sometimes loses the human thread of its characters.
It feels as if the sequences tangle more from the exercise itself than from a coherent through-line. Yet the film earns attention for portraying the people behind the lights, exposing their insecurities, fears, and dependencies within a rise that follows an ascending arc of fame. It embodies the paradox: reach the stars, but miss the ground, the anonymity and freedom of smaller stages. Still, the pacing of this cinematic album rarely settles into a single, clear rhythm, leaving the audience searching for a melody in the noise. A revealing anatomy of a Planet to talk about the Planets, formed by Jota, Eric, and May. Yes, it is a film about the Planets. They are not merely a band but an equation. Like water, the removal of the oxygen would distort the whole identity. A family unit that must stay unbroken. Like in Almudena Grandes’s novel Castillos de Cartón, youth, vast and fragile, stretches the moment where one dares to shape the sharp edges of a shared, invisible space that makes dreams real and reality feel too small. As the band grows, the castle begins to crumble.
And so does the music, the gravitational force that, in the quiet of its listening, answers the rhetorical questions life poses—emotionally enigmatic—proving that not every truth needs heavy words. When Lacuesta and Rodríguez let the camera glide, cutting fewer angles and letting the characters orbit like genuine planets, the lyrics, in harmony with what’s shown, lend the necessary meaning the film had been chasing through stylistic bravado.