La Belle Jeunesse – Once upon a time the cinema

Natalia and Carlos, twenties, are in a precarious situation: they are trying to survive every day, but the situation is complicated by the day when Natalia gets pregnant. With a social subject if the potential pessimistic, Jaime Rosales displayed a timely sense of the blueprint. His film is carried by a rough writing, devoid of affectations, made of repetitions (the cycle of day) and descriptions of all documentary rigor ( La Belle Jeunesse is a highly encrypted film – constantly it speaks of money, the amount that we perceive or that one expenditure). By his hard-line, it stands as an inventory chilling a country adrift (Spain undermined by the economic crisis), but more broadly, the whole of Europe, as even the nation s the most “healthy” are only an illusory refuge (in this respect, La Belle Jeunesse the question, exciting, internal migration phenomena in European countries).

At the close of its main couple Rosales reveals a gap – that of lost youth is trying to get out of the ambient atmosphere of resignation: unlike their elders, she has not lost the ability to dream of a brighter future. With a constant concern for accuracy, the filmmaker gives the full measure of the inherent frustration with being poor in a social model ruled by consumerism. However, it does not fall into demagogy: this mechanical money as the only valid measure in a world without values ​​rubbed off on the characters themselves. Evidenced by Carlos aggression, when a priori strong narrative which is found ultimately reduced to a mere mercantile pretext (how to take advantage of the situation by reaching a maximum benefit).

However, Rosales has the good taste to move away from mere social observation in the form of chronic realistic, both in its biases flashier than its retail work. There is something of the order of urban poetics (Antonioni?) That plays in those few moments scattered where the camera lingers, fence of a sequence, the scene of the action (a court, wasteland, an apartment living room) now emptied of any human presence. The stylistic choices of the filmmaker, however, are most overt in their strategy éludement implementation throughout the film, it will result in an appeal to the outfield (Carlos aggression) or repeated use of the ellipse.

So the two events that disrupt the lives of the protagonists (the baby is born, the starting Natalia in Germany find work) ultimately illusory promises of new start, they are given us to do as a way of indirect representation, cross: via a telephone interface, messages and photographs that circulate there. This process in itself quite ugly on an exclusively aesthetic, yet shows a beautiful daring, and especially the sound, except for the noise from the phone itself is completely discharged (average, perhaps, to account for the inhuman silence of Technology). Accelerated scrolling of the amount of messages and photographs accumulated on the phone causes a real effect of stunning (a life she summarizes that?).

In this context, one could blame Rosales to do a little bit in the speech, namely the contrast between the film as representation of reality (with grain film and filming Shoulder camera unstoppable guarantee a so-called label “truth”), and interludes “connected” as hermetic sphere illustration of a virtual world completely disconnected from the reality of the world, where one creates his own image. Yet it would not see what is at work in these confusing bits: When Natalia development in Germany, in the flow of images produced and inconsistent (Natalia and her friend to the apartment, at work, in the street …), a photograph comes off the multitude: the young woman leaning against a railing, fleeing look and inscrutable face. At this point seems to be opening an unexpected breach, an enigmatic suspension, almost a tear in this portfolio dummy happiness, which anticipates the final sequence. And so the film to end on a terrible and implacable no te that what at first was only a means to complete a month-end is similar to the one to the future in a world permanently deprived horizon .