Frances Ha was forced to run everywhere in order to understand at some point who she was, Patricia López Arnáiz had no other choice in ‘Ane’ than to resort to becoming a kind of police officer of life while making sure to keep his work and his head in its place and thus, a long etcetera of characters from the big or small screen have shown what seemed a vital need in fiction to have the feeling that everything moves and that the action doesAlso, with the movement of the characters.
In this usual scenario of continuous movement, fast pace and striking actions, the director and screenwriter Carla Simón opened a breakthrough window in 2017 when ‘Summer 1993’ was released in theaters. A film in which she pursued a “natural” tone, as she herself explained at the time, with two girls as the main protagonists, who improvised with certain guides a script not learned beforehand and with whom the relationships between the characters were worked on from zero: cooking with them to build a real family or taking them to the park.
Works like ‘Suc de Síndria’, the Goya-winning short film by Irene Moray, also slipped through there in the following years; ‘Carmen y Lola’, by Arantxa Echevarría, or the recent ‘Libertad’, by Clara Roquet, which also share the naturalism and intense stillness of being set in a summer. Its rhythm is also very different from what we are used to, running the risk that the viewer will think at some point that “nothing is happening”.
‘Alcarràs’, true life
The movement has finally exploded in ‘Alcarràs’, Simón’s second film that has ceased to belong so much to the independent circuit after winning the Golden Bear at the Bertín Festival. “Author cinema can also be for the public”, stated his producer, María Zamora, after the premiere of the film in Spanish cinemas. What Zamora describes as auteur cinema is nonetheless the recent feature film that has portrayed the purest Spanish view of life no need to build big scenes or narrate fancy dialogue.
The way of telling stories that Carla Simón has shown to viewers in her first two films has been based on some memories of his life and in what is known, certain autobiographical elements that, although they also make other productions that may form part of this particular film movement special, such as the case of ‘Júlia ist’, by Elena Martín Gimeno, do not explain 100% of the that ‘Alcarràs’ is being talked about as a “miracle” of Spanish cinema.
A key part of the appeal of ‘Verano 1993’ and ‘Alcarràs’ lies in what could be defined as ‘cinema out of nowhere’, understanding lots of scenes from non-verbal language like dialogue that doesn’t need to be explicit to show gestures and family dynamics that, although due to their slower tone may seem something very different from the intrepid and non-stop action of the most commercial cinema, they are small details that trigger the motivation of the characters until the final explosion of the conflict, that which in ‘Verano 1993’ it translated into Frida’s disconsolate crying in the scene that closed the film.
The writing and the way of capturing Carla Simón and her production team before the camera —also adds the discussion work in the script process with Arnau Vilaró; the contribution of the director of photography Daniela Cajías, the first solo woman to win the Goya for best cinematography in 2021 for ‘Las Niñas’; the role in the casting of Mireia Juárez or the staging by Ana Pfaff—it comes to resemble rather document life than to invent a fiction.
Thus, in ‘Alcarràs’ we start from the village of the director’s mother to talk about the known from a contemplative gaze that gives weight to each character when the time is right, whether about Quimet, the father who now works the land and is going through a moment of vital crisis, and Roger, the son who never seems to meet his father’s expectations; the granddaughter Mariona and Rogelio, the “godfather” and grandfather of the clan; Iris and her cousins; Dolors and the aunts of the family, one of them played by Berta Pipó, Carla Simón’s sister; or those who surround the particular world in the field of the Solé, from those who play the role of speculators to those who also serve as sustenance of the land.
Simón has once again used non-professional actors in this film, “natural” actors with an accent from the Segrià region, the only exception being Pipó, who already played one of Frida’s aunts in ‘Verano 1993’. With this starting point she has worked based on improvisations ahead of the shooting weeks to build a “new family”who would share time and customs for six months, as Berta Pipó recalled in a post on Instagram some time ago.
With this mechanism of building ties between the protagonists of the film, the script and its dialogues have been worked to the millimeter again, as was done in ‘Summer 1993’, not from memorization but rather from the scene itself to pursue the desired narrative objective with the greatest purity possible.
As Carla Simón and Arnau Vilaró say, for example, in a report devoted to the ‘Alcarràs’ film by the program ‘El cine en la SER’, the simple everyday gesture of closing a door can bear a great narrative weight in a scene to advance the plot and lead the characters to the desired point. ‘Alcarràs’ is populated with small details of contemplative cinema and glances, like those that are given away in family scenes in which they are all together and that are loaded with messages.
Music as untold stories
Another way to transmit that Carla Simón has exploited in her second film, in addition to the popular festivals that already appeared in ‘Verano 1993’ as a different setting for the characters to move, has to do with a message in the form of a song that serves at different moments of the film to give a feeling of union to this family and to express, without words put on paper, feelings that would be too unreal to show otherwise.
“If the sun were a day laborer, it wouldn’t get up early like this. If the marquis were the one who threshed, we would die of hunger already. I do not sing by voice, neither at dawn nor at the new day. I sing for my friend who lost his life for me“, Iris, the girl from ‘Alcarràs’, can be heard singing in front of her family in a scene from the film. Thus, it permeates from generation to generation without anyone realizing it in these phrases of a traditional song, a ‘cançó’ tambourine, the underlying political message that the film also works on: if the Solé family doesn’t work the land, the speculators will.
- Note: ‘Alcarràs’ adds 291,458 viewers (according to Comscore) after four weeks in theaters, becoming the most watched Spanish film in theaters in the country so far in 2022.