Jaime Rosales competes for Gold Shell for the first time with ‘Headshot’ (2008) and now doing it again with ‘Wild Sunflowers’and the distance between the two films is much more than 14 years. They are, it is true, two fictions closely linked to the society of their time, but in very different ways. One was an aggressive ‘artistic’ thought on terrorism because of its formal and narrative aridity, pure risk designed to create controversy and confrontation, and in part for this reason remains one of the Barcelona artist’s greatest artistic achievements; the other one presented this Saturday in San Sebastian One of his most conservative and simplistic works on a conceptual level, no less bold and precise. when dealing with the work object and therefore more controversial.
Starring an enormous Anna Castillo, The film presents a three-step portrait of a mother of two who has been exposed to many troubled emotional relationships.: first, the cohabitation of an unemployed man with tattoos on his body, accumulating debts, and obvious aggression issues from the moment he entered the scene; the second is a soldier stationed in Melilla, who is the real father of the minors but refuses to care for them except to send them money; third, with a man who is better educated and better off, who wants to have a family but is not ready to make the sacrifices that it requires.
In other words, ‘Wild Sunflowers’ offers a concise catalog of various forms of toxic masculinity. And the most pressing problem he presents in the process is that the male characters almost never become nothing more than mere representations of this catalog – and in some cases, inexplicably exaggerated; and while exposing them the movie is a lack of clear conviction about your purpose, so it ends up suggesting meanings that Rosales certainly didn’t intend, with good reason. A? Some women have a particular tendency to choose the wrong man. Other? All males are poisonous, but members of the lumpen are more poisonous than those from a good family.
dangerous classes
Also presented at the competition today, ‘El suplente’ offers a reflection on the social tensions faced by many students and teachers in conflict zones.he does so through the portrait of an Argentine middle-class intellectual whose existence is changed completely when he enters a school in a drug-ravaged slum as a substitute teacher and he tries to fix the path of his students. will have to work hard. Director Diego Lerman fails to explore the tough ethical issues suggested by his predecessor, and his introductions to ‘suspense’ are somewhat lukewarm; In any case, unlike all the movies about a rich teacher who lives a dirty life in a classroom full of kids and changes their lives overnight in an artificial, condescending and cynical way, ‘El suplente’ is dramatically restrained and often believable. The movie is much closer to ‘The Class’ (2008) than ‘Dangerous Minds’ (1995).
As for the third contender for the Golden Shell presented today, ‘Runner’ manages to derive great dramatic power from a rigorous narrative minimalism. Set in the depths of America in a rather uncertain time, Marian Mathias’ debut feature is about a girl who has to travel miles to bury the body of her suddenly deceased father. a similarly lost youth; meanwhile, it extracts all possibilities of expression from a landscape of wind, rain, and mud, and a series of events and conversations that are only seemingly insignificant. It takes 76 minutes and the impressive profitability it achieves on its route is almost miraculous.