Spanish-based Argentinian filmmaker Marina Seresesky made her feature debut with The Open Door [+lire aussi :
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fiche film]. Now, in the Official Selection (out of competition) of the 22nd Seville European Film Festival, she has presented Islas, a film toplined by Ana Belén and Manuel Vega, with support from Eva Llorach and Jorge Usón.

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The action unfolds in a huge hotel on Tenerife, the Paradise, which takes over the screen much as the Overlook did in Kubrick’s The Shining. But whereas that was a horror flick where solitude transformed into a curse, here, the glory years of its protagonist, Amparo (played with plenty of brio and self-parody by iconic Spanish performer Belén, last seen on the big screen in The Queen of Spain [+lire aussi :
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That is, until she comes across someone in a similar situation, but under different circumstances: Toni (Vega), a young man who, with his backpack loaded with stones (literally and metaphorically), throws himself into the pool of that very hotel. From that moment on, once the diva rescues him, a bond forms between them that is as tender as it is fraught, as maternal as it is understanding; they are two opposites finding common ground to flee their loneliness.

It is this odd romance between two people of different ages and at different stages of life that underpins a film oscillating between melancholy and a quirky strain of black humour that won’t be to everyone’s taste. For although the movie touches, tangentially, on weighty matters such as immigration, suicide, mental illness and ageism, it seems more preoccupied with aestheticised framing than with probing its themes.

But the best part of the spectacle (the auteur of which admits to drawing inspiration from masters such as Roy Andersson and John Cassavetes) lies in watching a radiant, uninhibited Ana Belén morph into a Spanish Norma Desmond, appealing – like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire – to “the kindness of strangers” in this feature steeped in sad, disenchanted humour, lengthy silences and decadent parties, shot through with the apathy, vulnerability and lethargy of its characters.

Islas is a film staged by E-media Canary, in association with AF Films, Meridional Producciones, Match Point and BTF Media.