At what point in our life do we understand that our skin is the deepest thing we have? In his second feature film, Elena Martin (‘Júlia Ist’) has placed the body in the foreground to investigate precisely that question that paraphrases the sentence of the poet Paul Valéry. We are flesh, skin, but above all the result of joy, of desire.
Few things are more taboo, more uncomfortable to see and at the same time so fascinating than a woman feeling pleasure. The iconography of feminine joy is everywhere, from the images of Venuses that are delivered to the male gaze to pornographic cinema, an athletic farce of everything that the female body can do.
In ‘Creatura’, Martín leaves aside the tricky iconographic question of sexual relations to focus on another thorny aspect: when and how a woman, in this case Mila, the protagonist, begins to feel pleasure and at the same time feel guilty about it. For this mission, Mila will carry out an investigation through her memories in order to draw a map of her sexual-affective education, the key so that her pleasure stops giving her hives.
‘Creatura’: the three ages of a pussy
Co-written with Clara Roquet (‘Libertad’), ‘Creatura’ explores Mila’s sexuality from three key moments in her life: adulthood, when she suffers from problems in reaching sexual fulfillment; adolescence, when her desire emerges marked by the gaze of others; and her first sexual instincts during childhood.
In those earlier ages, Mila, embodied by Martín in his adulthood, has the face of Clàudia Malagelada and Mila Borràs. The three make up that complex emotional range that accompanies the phenomenon of sexuality. In fact, there are many uncomfortable moments that border the film with an unprecedented risk.
In fact, and in line with the uncomfortable sensations that the film arouses, the structure of ‘Creatura’ could evoke us the various phases of emotional and sexual learning proposed by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. At times, the film seems as if it is going to embrace some of its theorems, but fortunately, they are nothing more than red herrings along the way.
Sex, always with humor
In this tangle of contradictory feelings, Martín dares to address some of the problems his protagonist suffers. with an unprejudiced sense of humor.
The series of jokes with which the film is toying serve to counteract the idea that all debates about sex must be instructive.. On the contrary, Mila’s story is frank and direct, and she draws a story that also explains her way of being in the world. From pleasure but also from fear, an emotion that reflects the social burden, in all its dimensions, that women continue to bear because of their bodies.
“Your body is a battlefield”, reads the title of one of the best-known works by the artist Barbara Kruger. For Elena Martín, also from reconciliation.
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