THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
It all starts with a series of faces. We are in a bar in Madrid, one winter evening in 2020, where pianist Chano Dominguez is performing. After a lively and colorful projection, he continues with a more elegiac piece, entitled Limbo. But the camera lingers on four figures in the audience, captured close-up in their pensive listening. A marvelous way of presenting the quadrille of the future protagonists to the spectator: without embellishment, without words, but simply by their silent presence, swelling with a music that embraces the changing reflections of their uncertain souls.
It is about two couples of friends reunited for the first time after a long period not mentioned, but which is called the pandemic, and of which certain traces remain (the mask incidentally put on or removed). Elena (Itsaso Arana) and Dani (Francesco Carril) live in an apartment in Madrid, when Susana (Irene Escolar) and Guillermo (Vito Sanz) take the opportunity to move to the countryside, where they enjoin them to visit them . What the first will end up resolving to, six months later, once the fine weather has come, to spend Sundays in their house with garden. But is nature really close at hand? And country life something other than a city fantasy? It is on this argument as thin as a cigarette paper that Jonas Trueba, humble and discreet Spanish prodigy discovered in France with his fifth feature film, Eva in August (2020), opens a reflection on the tipping point of age (the approach of quarantine) and the stops of existence.
After three hours forty of the documentary-river who besides us (2021), come to see could constitute for the cinema an equivalent of what the short story is as a literary genre. He shares first of all its brevity, stretching over just over an hour, but also, and more significantly, the aesthetic project. The short story generally works like a magnifying glass: it serves less to deal with major subjects than to circumscribe a detail – a movement of the soul, a decisive moment, a fleeting mood, etc.
A form of incompleteness
come to see focuses on this kind of tenuous reason: the numbness of post-confinement, the difficulty in renewing eroded relationships. Trueba has no other subject than this fabric of prints. Constraining itself to it without trying to inflate it with romance, the film borders on inconsistency, sailing to the confines of the prerogatives of fiction. But through the eyes of these reunions depicted in two acts, two anti-spectacular moments as possible (a drink, a lunch), he manages to convey all the lives, possible and impossible, of his characters.
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