The 79th Cannes Film Festival continues. On May 16, a film by Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen, entitled “My Love,” starring Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo, was screened there. According to the plot, the famous director collaborates with his actress daughter – and she quickly remembers why they have not communicated for many years. The main difference from “Sentimental Value,” which had a similar plot at last year’s festival, is that it is a film about films. To enhance this effect, Sorogoyen and cinematographer Alex de Pablo developed a unique cinematic language for the film. Anton Dolin talks about the film.
After many years of separation and loss of communication, the father, a world-famous director, returns to his homeland and meets his adult daughter, an actress by profession. He offers her the lead role in a new, more personal and important film for him…
If it seems to you that you saw such a film last year, and that it participated in the Cannes Film Festival and won an Oscar, then you do not think so: the film “Sentimental Value” by Norwegian Joachim Trier has become one of the brightest events of the film season. Now she has a double – my Spanish “love”, and you have a legal right to feel déjà vu.
This is not plagiarism, but a fatal coincidence. Why didn’t Rodrigo Soroguín – no less revered and respected than Trier – abandon his plan, postpone filming, or rewrite the script? Maybe because directors are strong-willed, persistent, narcissistic people who are always confident that they are right, otherwise they would choose a different career. And Soroguin, judging by his previous films (“Mother,” “Predators”), understands obsession better than many.
However, the viewer only benefited. “My Love” is more complex, more layered, more traumatic, and more creative than “Sentimental Value” – and although it essentially repeats the same situation, it is structured quite differently. In addition, its main content is what Trier did not include in the frame at all: the joint photography of father and daughter.
It is difficult to imagine that a counter-film will repeat the theatrical and festival success of “Sentimental Value” – but this cannot be ruled out either: at the very least, one should not discount Javier Bardem’s talent. Another funny detail: his work in the Cannes jury will be judged by the performer of the mirror role in the Norwegian drama – Stellan Skarsgård.
Cinema as a game of mirrors, reflecting our hidden fears and desires, is too seductive a topic for authors to stop worrying about. “My love” is another confirmation of this.
The test of the creators and actors is already the first scene, before the credits with the title – an impressive meeting of about twenty minutes between two-time Oscar winner Esteban Martinez (Bardem) with his daughter Emilia (the new star of Spanish cinema Victoria Luengo, also directed by Pedro Almodovar in the last two films). They haven’t seen each other for nearly a decade and a half. The appointment was made at a restaurant.
At first, father and daughter shyly try to listen to each other’s wavelengths and perfunctorily discuss the menu. Then they briefly exchange meaningless news: they haven’t communicated for so long that you can’t really talk about anything. They finally get down to business: Martinez is filming an ambitious project on the exotic island of Fuerteventura about Spain’s desert colonial past — and he wants Emilia to play the lead role. She promised to think about it, but seemed inclined to agree.
Close-ups of Bardem and Luengo do not leave the screen for a minute. The actors create something magical. Without tricks or special effects, avoiding drama and not raising their voices, they establish the dramatic structure for the spectacle of power, love and resentment that will unfold before us in the next two hours.
The restaurant is not just a common place for business or family meetings, but an important statement of intent by the author. “My Love” attacks an uncomfortable subject: we are talking about the physical and bodily dependence of an actor on a director, and a child, even an adult, on a parent.
The film’s emotional climax is the filming scene, which is disproportionately long as the first on-screen meeting between father and daughter. In the story, the table is set under the sky in nature. Behind him sit costumed figures—men, women, and children—eating fish soup, maintaining a casual conversation. But there is always something wrong. At first, the camera gets stuck and doesn’t hold the frame, so you have to do several takes. Then one of the performers actually refuses to eat soup – it’s still 9am, and he’s not hungry.
The situation is becoming increasingly anecdotal, and now the performers are divided – they are simply unable to repeat the necessary ritual without laughing stupidly. Martinez’s patience has reached its limits. Finally he breaks down and screams at the artists like children and forces them to chew. In the end, he attacks Emilia, who dared to point out his unacceptable tone, and reprimands and humiliates her in front of everyone. The oppressive father and tyrannical manager are now inseparable and indistinguishable. Art and life have merged together, a brutal alliance.
Sorogoyen uses the film as a metaphor for the toxic relationship between father and daughter. Emilia, who played her mother in Martinez’s now cult debut film, deliberately interrupted her acting career and got a job as a waitress in a bar. For her, cinema is a place of trauma, starting with a childhood memory of going to the cinema with her father. He then got drunk and got into a fight with other onlookers. We went to see “Kill Bill 2”: As you know, Bill in Tarantino’s legendary action film was not just the bride’s lover, but also a fatherly figure – and he ordered her murder himself. However, in the second part of the dilemma she took revenge on him.
The main difference between “My Love” and “Sentimental Value” is that the vertical beds here metaphorically reflect the nature of cinema itself. Unlike Trier, Sorogoyen conceives his dramas not only about human relationships, but also about how the machinery of art works—at the time of its creation and afterward.
First of all, the acting prowess is striking. This impression is quickly overshadowed by the surprise of the film language that the director developed specifically for “My Love” – and this surprise does not weaken until the end. Real cameraman Alex de Pablo is no less important here as a hero than his spunky on-screen colleague Pippa (Pippa Gracio): after Martinez’s collapse, she stops the filming process midway, in solidarity with Emilia.
De Pablo and Sorogoyen mix extreme close-ups and wide shots, interweaving newspaper reports with postcard views of a volcanic island (the mouth of an extinct volcano serves as another powerful metaphor). They are constantly experimenting with lenses, formats and cameras: they shoot still and moving frames, handheld and from drones, on black and white and various color films, on 65mm, 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, digitally and in Mini DV format. Even the director’s commentary on the Blu-ray is included in its catalog of tricks. Editor Alberto del Campo assembles a whimsical mosaic, changing perspective, angle and vision right in the middle of the episode.
Such moves are often used to break the fourth wall – when the viewer needs to get past the illusion: “You’re watching a movie, the people on the screen are fake, and the actors are just playing roles.” “My Love” turns this tradition on its head: a kaleidoscope of angles and filters immerses the audience directly into the minds of the main characters. Methods of cinematic vision are mixed freely in order to abolish the exclusivity of the director’s “patriarchal” gaze and fragment its imposed group. You can look at the event with different eyes, you can hear the observation and interpret it in your own way.
However, in some places, conversations cannot be heard at all – we are watching an almost finished product, and the film has not been shot yet! In another scene, Martinez demands to play vocal music, and a string orchestra covers the scene with emotion, like a wave. However, do not rush to shed tears, prepare for cathartic reconciliation: in a few seconds, everything will change again. The characters seem to gain independence and cease to be puppets of the author. After all, from a plot point of view, “My Love” is an account of an independent daughter’s rebellion against her famous father.
Woman against man, actress against director, child against parent – a fascinating bullfight, hard to put down. But there will be no winner or loser in the battle. You will have to look for a suitable character to identify yourself on your own. My Love is a shape-shifting Proteus, a freely moving element, a universal transformer. A room of mirrors, where, if desired, any interested viewer will find his reflection.
“My Love” is as far removed from any political significance as the picturesque Fuerteventura of Madrid. The film conveys nothing fundamentally new, neither about the nature of creativity, nor about the traumas of children growing up without a father, nor about Spain’s colonial past, nor about the Canary Islands. But he will tell everyone something about himself, and this is no less important.