San Francisco International Film Festival 2008

[Chris Knipp]

JAIME ROSALES: SOLITARY FRAGMENTS (2007)


SONIA ALMARCHA

Scenes from life, a hymn to the quotidian

Rosales chooses to represent the everyday lives of two women in an everyday way. Short scenes, photographed with fixed cameras, sometimes in split screen; a focus on child rearing, an illness, mundane work (a grocery store, an office, a greeter for a convention), ironing clothes, playing cards, chatting about nothing much at dinner, or on a bus. A bus: ah, now there's some excitement. Young Adela (Sonia Almarcha), whose raising a one-year-old boy by herself and moves to Madrid, is on a bus that's blown up by a terrorist bomb. The next time we see her, she's battered-looking, and heads back to the country to see her aging papa. The mother of one of Adela's nice Madrid flat-mates, Ines (Miriam Correa), is Antonia (Petra Martinez), a widow who runs a grocery store, and the subject of the second story thread. Antonia's story is more complicated than Adela's, since she is closely involved also with two other daughters, Nieves (Nuria Mencia) and Helena (Maria Bazan). Nieves has to have an operation for cancer, and the self-centered Helena wants money so she and her husband can buy a second home. Pedro, Adela's ex, also wants to borrow money from her.

All this information is conveyed in the little vernacular scenes, with static cameras looking past objects, or several shots side by side on-screen showing the same people in a scene from different angles, and no music or much ambient sound--except that the last section is called "Background Noise.". It's like looking at a box of snapshots and piecing things together. Needless to say the actors are convincing. It's they who make this seem like eavesdropping on real conversations.

Money is tight, obviously. No one is doing especially well. The pressures lead Antonia to consider selling her house and moving in with her boyfriend Manolo (Jesus Cracio). Discussions over this cause a lot of tension within the family. Manolo repeatedly tries to calm things down, but without great effect. There are jealousies that must weigh on Antonia, and she is Nieves' chief support in her illness. Meanwhile Adela has to deal with trauma and loss.

Solitary Fragments won three Spanish Goyas, including Best Film and Best Director. It's everyday-ness and its reference to terrorism as a part of common experience may have impressed Spanish audiences especially, together with the dignity and restraint of the filmmaking technique. Rosales does a good job of balancing non-mainstream methods with humanistic content. Despite the distancing effects of the universally unmoving cameras, the alternating of two almost-unrelated story-lines, and a style that is low keyed to the extreme, one is drawn into the action through the eavesdropping, fly-on-the-wall viewpoint and one's ordinary curiosity about basic experiences and life choices. If this film doesn't awaken enthusiasm in everyone, it does command respect, and it builds gradually throughout its whole length with an increasingly profound sense of lives unfolding. The actual Spanish title is La Soledad, solitude, and subconsciously one is taught by the visual method, which never cuts back and forth in a conversation, for instance, to see each character as separate, essentially, in life, freestanding and alone.