23/10/2023 - Alfonso Amador directs a film about the rhetoric of the extreme right and the power of language

Imagine you are in a boat. Just you and two children, one of whom is your son. A storm breaks out. The two children are thrown out of the boat, neither of them can swim and there are no life jackets, the only chance you have of trying to save them is to jump into the water and swim to them. But in the fall they have separated from each other, going for one means leaving the other on their own, which means leaving them to die. You choose, they are both human beings born equal and free in dignity and rights, the only difference between them is that one of them is your child. With all this example of rhetoric, so begins Marina, Unplugged. The film directed by Alfonso Amador and starring Claudia Faci is based on the play of the same name by the director himself and Jorge Picó, and has just opened the 38th edition of Mostra de València – Cinema del Mediterrani.

Between fiction and mockumentary, throughout Marina, Unplugged we follow the leader of an extreme right-wing party in the process of preparing a monologue through which she aims to convey her ideology to her sympathisers. On the stage, she is joined by a director who constantly moulds her performance, articulating through small nuances, precisions, voice inflections, expressions and gestures the most convincing way to present her speech in order to persuade her audience. The film portrays the rhetoric of the far right, the communication strategies - verbal and non-verbal - that its leaders use to try to humanise their thinking, to try to reach people in a more persuasive and intimate way. One of the film's greatest achievements is how it manages to reach and reflect the heart and the key elements of these extreme right-wing parties. The manipulation of language, the recourse to the emotional, to the irrational, to the most animal part of us, and how in this way, by appealing to the instinctive, to fear, and through the possibilities offered by language, their ideas on issues such as racism, sexism, gender inequality and social justice get accepted and applauded.

Beyond the importance of the theme, of its ability to condemn fascism and its representation today, the lucidity and strength of the film lies in how it approaches it, how it uses cinematographic mechanisms to get to the heart of the matter. One component that holds up a large part of the film is its protagonist. The great Claudia Faci, through whose voice (who begins telling the aforementioned exemplary story), gestures, expressions, pauses and silences we enter into the depths and nooks and crannies of the discourse she performs. The choices of setting and colour -a contrasting, solemn black and white- are also very apt for reflecting on the manipulative power of the ultra-right. The protagonist leader is not in a mass arena spouting unabashedly fascist slogans, nor is she on a television programme angrily attacking her opponents, but in a theatre, in a space intelligently prepared to persuade, carefully and calmly reciting a well-written, perfectly calculated and thought-out text. She uses our language to embellish with beauty and forcefulness, appealing to that irrational part of us all, the hatred behind her discourse.

Marina, Unplugged is a disturbing, lucid and at times uncomfortable film, a reflection on the manipulative power of language and cinema’s ability to capture it.

Marina, Unplugged is a production from Silence Comunicación.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)