Director: Javier Rebollo
Screenplay: Lola Mayo, Javier Rebollo
Producers: Stefan Schmitz, Maria Zamora, Damian Paris
Starring: Carmen Machi, Pep Ricart, Jan Budar, Nadia de Santiago
Year: 2009
Country: Spain
Running time: 95min.
(3/5)
I really, really wanted to love this film. It’s Spanish, woman-focused, looked quirky and individual, and like it would do a whole lot with a little. And apparently, it worked for a lot of other people – the AFI New Lights Competition jury expanded its prize so that it could honor Woman Without Piano as well as Fish Tank (my review). But really, I didn’t think it was all that – it had a lot of good moments but didn’t add up to a satisfying whole.
Rosa is a housewife, clearly bored and unenthused by the mundane tasks she performs around the house after her husband (also boring) leaves for his job driving a taxi. The first half hour of the film or so sets up this unfulfilling monotony of Rosa’s life. That night, however, she dresses up, puts on a short wig, and heads out to the bus station, with apparently no real destination in mind other than “not here.” But the busses are all gone, and she and others wait in the station. Radek, the young Polish man sitting across from her, strikes up a conversation, and these two will spend the rest of the film in a night-long odyssey of sorts, going aimlessly from station to restaurant to club to hotel and back.
Throughout all this, Radek yammers (he seems to have something approaching Asperger’s Syndrome) and Rosa listens – though how closely it’s difficult to tell, especially since we’re reminded again and again that her hearing is failing, though exactly what metaphorical purpose that serves wasn’t quite clear to me. There’s quite a lot of humor in the film, mostly based on pauses and uncomfortable silences. Rosa’s got the worst sense of timing ever, and is constantly arriving just a little too late for something, or getting somewhere just in time to be told off for smoking or mistaken for a prostitute. In fact, director Rebollo was going for a silent cinema aesthetic, as he said time after time in the post-film Q&A. The problem is, I wouldn’t have known he was trying to emulate Tati or Chaplin or Keaton if he hadn’t said so; the film isn’t nearly as silent as he seems to think, and I simply didn’t see the resemblance he was trying to claim.
Ultimately, little seems different at the end than it was at the beginning. There’s hope of something changing in Rosa’s home life after the exploits of the night, and the subtlety of the ending is something I would usually respect and enjoy, but the film leading up to it simply didn’t earn it.
you are all so well-adjusted and interested in everything...
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