The artist and the model, is the most beautiful film of the year. A masterpiece that returns poetry to film.
Directed by Fernando Trueba, The artist and the model is the strongest and logical candidate to represent Spain in the next installment of the Academy Awards in Hollywood. The other two candidates, Blancanieves and Unit 7, are very good films that contribute to a year of Spanish cinema remarkably interesting and deserve to have their own international tour of festivals and awards section, and especially the grand prize for the film that is meet the public with good box office results. Even acknowledge my personal penchant for Unit 7, a large police genre film that is among the best we’ve seen this year. Unit 7 is also the kind of movie that I think needs to Spanish cinema to reconnect with his audience, a genre with impeccable production quality and remarkable cast to interest the audience from the first image and from there build a product of evasion which have also accommodate the characteristics of auteur cinema. It is also exportable abroad, more so than other samples auteur, because the language of film genres is universal. As for Blancanieves, is another of the pieces to be taken into account in the production of Spanish cinema, from the side of exploration and risk, as essential to create a film with personality capable of covering the entire spectrum of film can offer. Along with Trueba’s film, both formed a triumvirate that nicely illustrates the different ways in which it should develop in the future Spanish cinema. So the managers of the film industry in the country, whatever their personal inclinations or lights or friends in the audiovisual business, this trio of films makes them fairly easy things when necessary decisions to not plunge the audiovisual production Spanish in a deeper crisis, and perhaps irreversible, which suffers from endemic form almost from the moment that the first film was shot locally produced, back in the days when the film had not even started talking yet. For if these managers are more disoriented than usual, here are some clues: the three are producing quality films, not parochial and other perfectly exportable and neither offends the viewer with a political pamphlet, it which is not to say that lack of values or its creators have done without trying to give a dignified and ethically viable life.
However, we must be realistic. Facing Unit 7 and Blancanieves, the film directed by Fernando Trueba brings many more features needed to be selected as a finalist for the Academy Awards in Hollywood. I refer not only to the fact that the director has already climbed to collect an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film that gave Anthony Hopkins by Belle Epoque (1992), a fact which certainly has its importance, or the experience Trueba may have acquired in the complicated maneuvers of tactics and strategy needed to move in what some call the «race to the Oscars,» but primarily on merit only film that brings The artist and the model.
After seeing the movie makes you want to leave the room and start thinking and sculpt, but above all, enjoy more carefully and more interest in their lives. Trueba’s alliance in the direction and Jean-Claude Carrière in the script takes full advantage of the film to clay, sculpting a movie full of magical moments in which much of the magic comes also from his actors. The appearance of Claudia Cardinale in the role of the artist’s wife who was younger was the most beautiful model has the magic of the echoes of the glorious past is reflected in the character of Aida Folch, in a brilliant job of interpretation. An extremely complex and difficult work that Folch gives a stunning simplicity and fragility that at times we refer to the memory of the early days of cinema, the glorious days of the silent movies that reached high levels of expression eminently visual before that the word is being imposed as new films to keep a different relationship with the viewer. Aida Folch’s work, the model must remain silent and simply express his motionless body, fits perfectly with the equally remarkable performance artist who gives life Jean Rochefort giving your character a sunset poetry of existence is both a celebration of life that audiences more receptive they will be hard to forget as motivation when facing their own walks through this world.
Trueba clay in this film is the remarkable chemistry between Folch and Rochefort in such special circumstances and in a film where the image, looks and gestures over words dominate absolutely. A film where silence is a vital player and time seems frozen in a handful of magical moments, so that at some point the film becomes painting and sculpture, and our perception of it is changed in the same direction, aided by Photography work of Daniel Vilar equally remarkable with a black and white is not the result of whim or visual boast but essential coherence with the theme of the film.
The chemistry between Rochefort and Folch, between the artist and the model of the title brings back the magic of silent film while being fully present, because they do not understand the masterpieces of time. And this film is a masterpiece. A beautiful story about beauty whose heart might well be in the sequence in which the artist explains his model Rembrandt drawing, and not coincidentally leads to the central plot of the Resistance subplot that in times of WWII. Within the magic that call for this film, Carrière Trueba and manage to keep a pulse on the remarkable story that is fully consistent with the same theme: the art tries to keep out of his world war, which is death, for almost all the footage, although sporadically seep into their world, with increasing frequency, touches of horror that is out there, as the student uniform German artist, or a member of the resistance that welcomes and assists the model. In the end, war is imposed and the characters are thrown into the world devastated when the dam was the artist to keep the river of death away from your beautiful island just breaking into one of the most beautiful sequences while most disturbing film that fits perfectly with the first images of this story, with the artist walking through the woods and collecting bird’s skull.
Cinema at its best. Great movie. Visual poetry that is based on the only element that desperately needs every masterpiece to keep breathing: truth.
A film that deserves an Oscar.
Miguel Juan Payán
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