30/09/2024 - David Pérez Sañudo takes on a commission, making a big-screen adaptation of Txani Rodríguez’s novel of the same name, a movie steeped in a sad atmosphere where only fantasy allows for any joy

Ane Is Missing [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: David Pérez Sañudo
film profile] was a real springboard for Bilbao native David Pérez Sañudo: the film was presented four years ago in the New Directors section of the San Sebastián Film Festival and subsequently snagged three Goya Awards (after being nominated for five). His second feature is now being premiered in the same sidebar of the Basque gathering, is titled The Last Romantics [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and is his response to a commission received from his producers to convert the Txani Rodriguez book of the same name into images.

And so, the film homes in on Irune (played by Miren Gaztañaga), an insecure woman with hypochondriac tendencies, who works in a paper factory in a town in Northern Spain. Her interpersonal life is limited to her work colleagues, a neighbour with a troublesome son and a telephone operator from the Renfe train company, with whom she consults the timetables for trains that she never manages to catch. When a lump is found in her breast and she gets embroiled in a work dispute – alongside a separate one with her neighbours – her life will finally take a much-needed turn, offering her the opportunity that she had always, perhaps unwittingly, been hoping for.

Just like he did in Ane Is Missing, Pérez Sañudo accurately depicts that overcast, northern landscape that he knows only too well. To this, he adds an extra dose of melancholy with dim, grey and intentionally ugly cinematography, which brings it into line with the films of the Dardenne brothers and ends up imbuing the entire running time with sorrow, making it a hard watch. This is because everything is made up of minor misfortunates which fall like silent bombs around our antiheroine – a shy, reserved woman, who is quiet, oversensitive, beset by solitude and can only escape from the greyness enveloping her through her romantic thoughts.

In addition, workplace exploitation, abuse in the family and the looming threat of her illness add yet more dense, intense and weighty ingredients to a feature penned by the director himself together with his regular writing partner Marina Parés, and which is just begging to take another gulp of air before submerging itself in negativity once again. All of this turns The Last Romantics into an experience that is overly uncomfortable to watch, although, thank goodness, at the end, it seems as though the events depicted prompt the main character to redirect her monotonous existence. She thus emerges from her state of virtual paralysis, which makes it difficult for the viewer to connect emotionally with her up to that point. Having said that, as the brains behind this film have stated, the main character – and we – will always have fantasy as an infallible weapon to flee from horror.

The Last Romantics is a production by La Claqueta PC and Irusoin, in co-production with Irune and Miguel Maria AIE, La Cruda Realidad and Miami Film Gate (USA). It will hit Spanish screens on 15 November, distributed by A Contracorriente Films. Its international sales have been entrusted to Latido Films.

(Translated from Spanish)