14: Lovers
is a pity that some filmmakers have forgotten and even more painful when this oversight has contributed to the lack of interest in his films and awaken gradually manifest, beyond the little or no national distribution in soil have suffered. And I speak, I clarify, a personal view. At least some of that has happened to me with Catalan Vicente Aranda, a filmmaker whose career I've been more or less attentive and although my memory that some, if not all, registered. Aranda was a filmmaker and expected more of that shortly, I feel, has offered. Responsible
such expectations was the first film I saw of him, though not the first of his now extensive filmography. This is Lovers (Spain, 1990), a remarkable melodrama, black and sordid, about a pair of cursed lovers decided to take their relationship to its ultimate consequences. Borrower the best tradition of American film noir but Hispanicized the context of Franco gray and miserable and performed splendidly by Victoria Abril at its best (who was, in fact, a significant part of his films his favorite actress), Lovers was not a masterpiece, its shortcomings have them, but not as much to worry about. And allowing me to oversize it contains one of the best and most beautiful scenes that have server memory, one in which an emotionally destroyed Maribel Verdú begs his death to a dubious Jorge Saenz in a lonely place in a snowstorm . Compelling and frightening at once. Devastating.
What did happen? I have the impression that gold Aranda us the pill, since we are still telling the same story again and again, under the pretext of "Authorial obsession" with which some critics seek to legitimize the work of certain filmmakers repetitive. And may have introduced some variations diegetic (the context, the characters age, profession) but basically all your movies, or at least I've seen after lovers are the perfect example of déjà vu . A Aranda, I think what's happened to Arturo Ripstein : turning what in the more open criticism in the laudatory sense is designated as "personal universe," his "obsession" because, in a formula, with all its schematic steps.
Yes, a lot of hysteria, and true (in the pure sense of the term nymphomania), overwhelmed blind, unbridled passion that invariably lead to tragedy, or poisoned happy ending (including the convergence of both.) Something that, frankly, did a great work Lovers, exceptional in an era in which almodovoriana saturation began to emerge. Unfortunately, all that too, I think, has led to today Aranda look with indifference.
grave error, "said the Argentine critic Federico Karstulovich-believe that the obsessions and the universe are the most fantastic personal that can happen to a director.
(Joseph Abril)
