The myocardium is the muscle that surrounds the heart, pumps our blood and allows us to live. It is also the symbolically charged title of José Manuel Carrasco's second feature film, Myocardium [+lire aussi :
interview : José Manuel Carrasco
fiche film], which has been presented as part of the new Rampa section of the 21st Seville European Film Festival. Its protagonists are that actor who looks like the secret son of Jack Lemmon and Woody Allen, Vito Sanz, and a scintillating actress, the director's muse, Marina Salas.

Both of them have a lot of chemistry in Myocardium, but not always good chemistry. In the same vein of iconic couples such as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant or Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, they argue a lot, in continuous dialectical duels and, at times, with more than their fair share of acrimony. Because they were a couple, one left the other and now it's time to talk about it, to tell the truth to each other's faces and try to close old open wounds.

The 75 minutes of this film take place in two different settings: a television set and a bright and cosy, but leaky and damp apartment. In the first, the writer played by Luis Callejo (an actor who has already appeared in the short films by the same filmmaker, Vida en Marte and Consulta 16) answers questions in an interview. From his answers, the camera travels through space-time until it settles in the second setting, where Vito Sanz wakes up with one of those lows that presage the end of your world.

But a phone call will turn his sad and desperate existence upside down. And then Ana, energetically embodied by Marina Salas, will appear at his doorstep. How could we not talk about the past, when she was an actress with a head full of dreams, and he was a writer to whom the critics gave the hackneyed label of “young promise”. The same label that, over time, has become ridiculously stuck (as he has not published anything again since).

Carrasco displays his proven skill at writing witty dialogue and confronting two characters who, swinging between comedy and drama, spit in each other's faces truths, criticisms and other insults, fuelled by years of silence and estrangement. A reunion that smacks of anger, resentment and nostalgia. And which the filmmaker, like in an endless loop or the umpteenth version of Groundhog Day, repeats up to four times to illustrate the different chances that life can sometimes offer.

With a simple mise-en-scène, but with sufficient depth, Myocardium relies on the committed performances of its protagonists, on conversations that do not overuse jokes, but do use puns, and on the power of fantasy to relive moments, to rekindle hopes and to end up rescuing lives gone adrift. Ultimately, a smile is the best way to talk about delicate matters; something that Billy Wilder, who Carrasco has found a model and teacher in, knew a lot about that.

Myocardium is produced by Malvalanda.