‘Especially at night’: Mother’s love for fascists

‘Especially at night’

Director: Victor Iriarte

Cast: Lola Dueñas, Ana Torrent, Manuel Egozkue, María Vázquez

Year: 2023

Premiere: December 1, 2023

★★★★

It is supported on a letter-shaped structure and in permanent movement between types: ‘road movie’, ‘noir’, musical, ‘thriller’, family melodrama and cinema of ghostsHE Víctor Iriarte’s first feature film touched on the scandal Children stolen during the Franco regime To review the official story about the transition.

To do this, he uses three characters: a woman whose child was taken away from her at birth twenty years ago, the person who later adopted the newborn without knowing that it had been kidnapped or that its biological mother was alive, and the surviving boy. son of both. The bonds the three of them form lead them to unite in a quest for revenge against those who deprived them of the truth for so long.

Defeat of fascism

Iriarte divides the film into four parts; In this episode, most of the story is told through voice-overs, and its scenes work like pieces of a puzzle that require the cooperation of the audience to come together. Meanwhile, the director’s insinuations The cinema of Hitchcock, Almodóvar, Godard and Oliveira They do not prevent him from clearly revealing his impeccable sense of rhythm and his unusual ability to create images, filling every frame, every movement and every look with meaning and transforming a multitude of formal findings into the ideal form of expression. A three-way love, groups whose strength represents the defeat of fascism.