THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
Apart from the champion in all categories Pedro Almodovar, Rodrigo Sorogoyen is one of the rare Spanish filmmakers – we could also mention Albert Serra or Jonas Trueba, in a more confidential register – to have won a reputation in France. Its scenarios tied up with onions, its heavy atmospheres and its sticky neo-polars have something to do with it. The author ofEl Reino (2019) and Madre (2020) puts himself in his new film, As Bestasa link between the two countries.
To do this, he calls on Marina Foïs and Denis Ménochet in the role of two French people in their forties who have broken with their previous life to settle, out of ideological conviction, in a village in Galicia, in order to carry out eco-responsible agriculture there. Antoine and Olga however fell badly. Their closest neighbours, Xan and Lorenzo Anta, sons of a woman herself not stung by beetles, are small local peasants who flourish on the abandonment of which they are victims on the part of Europe, and exercise in the village that kind of leadership reserved for the most unpredictable and vicious people.
The conflict erupts over a municipal vote ruling on the installation of wind turbines. Antoine and Olga tipped the vote on the side of refusal. Xan and Lorenzo are, for their part, part of these impoverished and embittered peasants who are only waiting for the financial compensation of the operation to leave the village. Their animosity towards two foreigners who are campaigning for the common good and the repopulation of the village imperceptibly turns, while the couple refuses to question their vote, into pure hatred, unbridled xenophobia, a pure and simple desire to destroy.
Deceptively naive register
Luis Zahera and Diego Anido, both born in Santiago de Compostela, the famous capital of the region, are absolutely unknown outside the borders if not of Galicia at least of Spain. They nevertheless lend to these characters, the farthest possible from the being of Christian charity, an impressive aura, reaching a register in the malevolent stupidity which is permanently inscribed in the memory of the spectators.
Zahera excels in the falsely naive, truly perverse register, which constitutes the ordinary reason of bastards. Anido, more in the background but riveted to his brother’s boots, portrays a silent semi-idiot, whose wickedness and dangerousness are not less. They are surrounded, in the bar where Xan holds his daily peroration and humiliates Antoine more often than in turn, by a band of natives peacefully ingesting their insanities, and, when things take a very nasty turn, by a civil guard whose passivity evokes ideological approval.
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