18/03/2025 - Celia Rico Clavellino fails to reach the lofty emotional heights of her previous films Journey to a Mother’s Room and Little Loves as she brings Rafael Chirbes’ novel to the big screen

Seville-born filmmaker Celia Rico Clavellino came to prominence with a bang: as part of the New Directors section of the San Sebastián Film Festival. It was there, in 2018, that she presented her feature debut, Journey to a Mother’s Room [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Celia Rico Clavellino
film profile], an intimist film about familial dependence – a conflict she delved deeper into, tenderly and demonstrating great talent, in her second feature, Little Loves [+see also:
film review
film profile], which earned her two prizes (the Special Jury Award and the Best Supporting Actress Award for Adriana Ozores) at the Málaga Film Festival. Now, just one year later, she is competing at this same gathering with her third effort, La buena letra [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which will be released in Spanish theatres in a few weeks’ time (30 April), courtesy of Caramel Films.

Expectations are therefore high for the new work by this director who has proven that she has more than enough chops to reflect the details underpinning familial and emotional relationships. However, in contrast with the two previous occasions, when she wrote the screenplays herself, this time, she has made a big-screen adaptation of a novel by author Rafael Chirbes, whose work we previously saw on the small screen via the exceptional series Crematorium, produced by Mod, which also staged La buena letra.

The title (lit. "Good Handwriting") alludes to the writing style used by the main character, Ana (played by Loreto Mauleón) – who is married to Tomás (Roger Casamajor) – to imitate that of her brother-in-law Antonio (Enric Auquer), who disappeared in post-war Spain. The woman writes letters, passing herself off as the man so that his mother will not suffer because of his absence. But one day, he comes home...

With an unhurried, methodical pace that has become the director’s hallmark, dim lighting that reflects the darkness of this period in history and restrained acting work making scant use of body language, La buena letra begins strongly, starting with the trivialities of everyday life at home as it portrays those fateful decades during which women were submissive, obedient and self-sacrificing: they sewed, cooked and cleaned tirelessly, ever at the beck and call of their husbands.

These were times of repression, of strict rules, of permissible machismo and of adhering tightly to societal norms. While Celia Rico portrays all of this accurately, her narrative restraint prevents the emotion from surfacing fully during the movie’s running time, and sadly, the tiresome routine crushing the protagonist ends up infecting the whole film with that same sense of despondency. Yes, it’s true that people’s existence really was this full of selflessness, mistreatment and sorrow, wallowing as they did in unfulfilled dreams and thwarted hopes for progress, but as a cinematic work, the film gradually drifts off course as the minutes go by, and it ends up feeling cold and soulless, morphing into a story where the viewer is forced to fill in too many silences with their own intuition and where the characters do not have sufficient empathic appeal.

La buena letra was produced by Mod, Misent Producciones and Arcadia Motion Pictures. Its international sales are handled by Film Constellation.

(Translated from Spanish)