Esmeralda and JJ have no choice but to keep going. No destination, no future, no way to return. Their only goal, to continue living, whatever, for no reason or reason, riding in a car that takes them away from a life they don’t want, but at the same time aware that there is nowhere in the world to escape from themselves. . ‘The Gigantes’ is a road trip for a new generation, which ignores the most explanatory scenes and plunges into a sea of beautiful images, unmistakable silences and devastating turns in a flight to nowhere.
Give it gas, this is not going to stop
Lately the audiovisual does not stop giving us female characters involved in a particular road trip, from the fabulous series ‘Sin huellas’ to the very sad ‘Nomadland’. There is something about seeing a woman fighting against the odds of fate that engages and prevents you from looking away from her. The problem with ‘The Giants’ is that trickster photography and exhaustingly beautiful shots fail to hide a friendship without a spark between a poor young woman with a tumultuous life and a posh girl who wants to break everything.
One wants to see her father. The other, to an old love who is waiting for her in Mexico. However, They are not willing to let their lives be controlled by the men who inhabit them. On paper it is very clear, but Beatriz Sanchís, the director, is not capable of making those motivations that we intuit cross the screen, and the trip does not end, at least for Esmeralda, with a simple tantrum. She deals with interesting topics, yes, but she doesn’t finish delving into any of them: suggesting instead of showing is usually a success, but not when not even the film is clear about what it intends to tell.
That is not to say that the film does not have fascinating images: divided into the kilometers from the beginning of the trip (it will never go back), Baja California and Northern Mexico. Seldom have they looked so deadly real. Nature as a weapon of destruction, a place to die, a decadent world that doesn’t care about your personal misery. It couldn’t have been shot anywhere else, and it certainly couldn’t be done better: two lost souls wandering the decrepit roads looking for an open door in a place that itself is an endless jail.
I want them all to die
‘The Gigantes’ plays with the coming of age of a girl full of adolescent angst and the greed of a woman who only manages to empathize with her in her moments of emotional destruction. In a movie like the ones we’re used to seeing, the two of them would end up getting to know each other better and discovering things about themselves along the way, but here, beyond a few moments of blossoming hope, they never cease to be a mystery to each other.
It’s interesting on paper, but frustrating on screen. especially because this lack of depth in your relationship also equates to a lack of layers of personality: We didn’t get to know the true desires of either of them until the very end, in a couple of very well worked scenes with which you don’t get to have a strong emotional connection because of a footage that seems bent on condemning the protagonists to the supporting role of their own lives.
Neither Esmeralda nor JJ have virtuosity or perfection in anything they do. Away from the misunderstood feminism of the cinema of the beginning of the last decade, Sanchís understands that his characters must have shortcomings and problems in themselves., that do not necessarily have to do with the men in your life. They exist in relation to themselves, to their body, to their needs, to their future. Not in relation to another person. Deep down, they both want the same thing, but in such different ways that their coexistence, without the need for shouting or outrages, becomes impossible.
And then long live Mexico, don’t suck
The plot and characters of ‘The Gigantes’ may not be the best defined in modern cinema, but visually it’s a scandal: the sun on the pores of the skin, the shadows at night, the endless road, the tension in a trunk crossing the border… This is where the film, which can be seen on Filmin, grows big, unique and prodigious, full of nuances and expressing more with a well-adjusted shot than with a thousand lines of expository script.
And finally We reached the last ten minutes where the entire plot that had remained dormant between the frames comes to light. with an ending as devastating as it is fair, showing that these characters have learned absolutely nothing along the way. They haven’t even gained a deep friendship. Both, as in their first minutes, just… they continue to exist, driving forward, never looking backbut at the same time living in a fictitious past from which they do not want to detach themselves.
‘The Giants’ is a film full of form defects, but with a fabulous and striking packaging. Yes, its two main characters may never convey much to us, or its plot may just be a flow of events, but it is worthwhile to get closer to a frankly beautiful trip through a desolate and hopeless place.
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