November 13, 2015 was going to be a party day for 1,500 Eagles of Death Metal fans, who were playing at the Bataclan in Paris. The night ended with eighty dead in a fateful night for France, which a few months earlier had suffered the attack on the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo. Now, seven years after the tragedy, Isaki Lacuesta moves away from morbidity and narrates the consequences of the attack on a couple that slowly breaks down… like his sanity.
ambulances and souvenirs
The best of ‘One year, one night’ is in its early stages. A couple, Ramón and Celine, wakes up after experiencing a terrorist attack in first person in the Bataclan room. They try to recover and return to the Saturday routine: he plays the guitar, they both laugh, watch television and answer whoever they can, trying to downplay the traumatic event. But if Isaki Lacuesta does something well in this film, it is simmer the mental deterioration of both and his relationship crisis that seems insurmountable.
Ramón cannot continue with his life after having that experience. Everything tastes like little, like failure, impossibility, absurd. Working is a debacle, living is overwhelming and nothing is able to fill you or take the uncertainty and danger out of your head. Celine, on her side, reacts in the opposite way: overcoming (or pretending to overcome) and trying to find happiness after having been in such direct contact with death and living the worst moments of her life with Ramón. . The gap between the two can only get bigger and bigger: They’re both in this together, yes, but at the same time they couldn’t be further apart.
During much of the footage of ‘One year, one night’, Lacuesta makes us believe that the entire film will deal with the couple’s post-traumatic stress and at no point will we see the attacks themselves. Big mistake: through flashbacks, included at the most appropriate moments and preventing the film from losing rhythm and interest, we see a fabulous recreation of what happened that night from the point of view of the victims. Without dwelling on morbidity, without showing the face of the murderers, without giving them the touch of empathy they don’t deserve.
The unseen terror
In the hands of another director more eager to attract attention, ‘One Year, One Night’ could have been an absolute disaster, but Lacuesta knows perfectly well that the situation does not ask for virguerías or morbidity, but understanding, affection towards the victims and objectivity. The tape, even in the scenes where it shows the attack, has a tone close to a documentary, trying not to add drama with extradiegetic elements. The tone is measured to the millimeter and hits full.
The problem is that the movie ends up getting lost and as the end approaches, he has less to tell. However, it is difficult for him to finish and it drags on over time adding unnecessary uncertainties, anticlimactic couple fights and summers in the village with C. Tangana. I understand that the appearance of Pucho is a publicity stunt, but it ends up distracting and taking away more than contributing. The viewer is immersed in the drama and ends up thinking, inexorably throughout all its scenes, “But isn’t that C. Tangana? What is he doing there?”
The third act of ‘One year, one night’ ends up being tedious: everything has already been said and the lengthening of the plots to try to give a satisfactory conclusion ends up weighing down a work that begins in style (that image of the two wandering lost through the streets of Paris) but does not know when or how to put a signature to match. Lacuesta likes these characters too much and is not ready to see them go.
the ghost of anxiety
‘One year, one night’ it is a puzzle in which the narrative chronology would not make sense, because everything mixes in the heads of his characters just as it would in ours: the day of the attack, the meetings with friends, meeting again a year later. A chronological montage would have damaged, and much, a film that uses editing to go backwards and forwardsin two lives that are turned upside down after a transformative event.
There are as many ways to overcome trauma as there are people in the world. Ramón subjects each vital moment to thatis unable to ignore the look of the one who pointed a gun at him. Celine refuses to let the terrorists win in her head too and forces himself to move on. And like them, thousands of people had to survive the Bataclan as best they could. If they could.
‘One year, one night’ It’s not a perfect movie, but it is the roundest job (and at the same time the most ambitious) by Isaki Lacuesta: a work that does not disdain to talk about the pain, the consequences, the trauma, the life that remains when it is invaded by terror. From the cracks of love between which pain and uncertainty sneak in.