‘No one should sleep’
Director: Antonio Méndez Esparza
Cast: Malena Alterio, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, José Luis Torrijo
Year: 2023
Premiere: November 17, 2023
★★★
Written with Clara RoquetWe can say that the director of Antonio Méndez Esparza’s latest film, ‘Libertad’, is his first story that is completely attributed to the fields of fiction, after the hybridizations he made with the films ‘Here and There’ and ‘Life and Nothing More’. ‘—two films about immigration and the American working class—and in ‘Courtroom 3H,’ his radical doc about the unified family court in the State of Florida. Here are well-known interpreters for the taleA story that is sometimes dramaticWhile sometimes it seems crazy, sometimes it seems like a fantasy, it explores a raw and harsh truth.
Malena Alterio is a computer programmer who lost her job. The turn his life took was very harsh: becomes a taxi driver. And as he sits behind the wheel of his car, against the reluctance of everyone he knows, he wanders the streets of Madrid and encounters characters whether friendly or arrogant, violent or reserved, friendly or unconventional. In the film there is a kind of document of almost conventional everyday reality, which merges, flows or clashes depending on certain passages, with a much more ambiguous story of the same reality and desires. The game becomes increasingly complex, giving us just enough clues to realize what’s going to happen, and even admits elements of gory cinema, revenge and absurdist humour.