interpreters Ángela Molina, Manel Llunell, Ana Polvorosa, María León, Antonio Durán, Macarena Gómez, Daniel Freire, Songa Park, Alberto Jo Lee
Year 2022
premiere January 13, 2023
★★★★
edward casanova With his debut ‘Pieles’, we were faced with a rare warning. in Spanish cinema. A director who dares to do different things, such as constructing an intransferable personal universe between the grotesque and the naive, without fear of sin, trouble, experimentation.
It all could have ended there, in a kamikaze debut, but his second feature film confirms that no, there’s still a lot to dig into. the deeply creative and destructive head The work of Eduardo Casanova.
‘La piedad’ focuses on a single story (it has a more choral and fractional structure, unlike in ‘Skins’): the relationship between a mother and son, and the toxicity that builds up between them, to the point where it becomes one. pathology. She (a totemic and expressive Ángela Molina) is called Libertad and is exactly what she denies to her son Mateo (the perfect young Manel Llunell, who has almost turned into a copy of the filmmaker himself) to the point of changing his life. in a prison a suffocating and ominous emptiness sickness and madness throb within him.
matriarchal dictatorship
Casanova then traces a deadly double comeback that approaches the cinema of the first Julio Medem: Compare matriarchal dictatorship with North Korean totalitarianism talking about oppression and subjugated emotions, and almost miraculously the metaphor works because that’s how the director’s cinema is, so free and daring, and only through these two virtues can true cinematographic enlightenment be achieved.
‘Mercy’ is a spooky tale, a metaphorical talebut also a tribute to plastic fantasy, in which images, colors and textures, artistic composition, together with an outstanding soundtrack, work like a symphony that simultaneously drags, displaces, fascinates and disturbs.