director Mikel Gurrea confronts two neo-rurals with the rugged reality of the terrain

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

Ivan and Elena, a young couple of architects, decide to leave Barcelona for the countryside where the young woman has just inherited a house and the adjoining cork oak farm. They arrive, their heads full of ideas: a major architectural overhaul project for her, a life as a “left-wing boss” for him.

Surothis is the eternal story of the gap between the fantasy of a “return to the earth”, far from the din of the big city, and its realization: little by little, the neo-rural couple will see their ideals snuffed out by reality. of the terrain, where the lines of tension will continue to appear, soon making the atmosphere explosive within the logging.

There are the inevitable class relations between landowners and workers, the arrival of a contingent of illegal workers that the couple fails to stem and the naivety of Ivan trying to make people forget that he is the boss for better drown his guilt of possessing.

Endless setup

Mikel Gurrea, who is directing his first feature film, sticks to such a watered-down, soon to be endless set-up that the intensity of his neo-western – which evokes As Bestas (2022), by Rodrigo Sorogoyen – gets lost along the way. The screenplay struggles to orchestrate the slow deterioration of the situation, other than with big strings, made up of conflicts that sound hollow, stares of earthenware dogs and marital disputes that are a little too didactic.

It is difficult to understand where the scenario is coming from apart from these few truisms: the bourgeois are guilty, the workers exploited. And then, thanks to an incident, the film turns around like a pancake, without warning: so many convolutions to finally make bourgeois virtue triumph over working-class savagery. Everyone has their reasons, but some more than others.