European Films

Spanish director Jaime Rosales presented his second film La soledad (Solitary Fragments), his fully formed meditation on contemporary life and loneliness, in the Un certain regard section here at Cannes. Working with split screens, a rigidly controlled sense of composition and a fabulous cast of unknowns, Rosales’s film is one of the most mesmerizing ways to spend two hours on the Croisette this year, though the film is unlikely to become an overnight boxoffice sensation anytime soon. Further festival exposure and limited arthouse engagements are more likely, though further exposure would be deserved.

 

The story offers two strands: one follows Antonia (Petra Martínez), the mother of three grown daughters and the other Adela (Paloma Mozo), the mother of a small boy who just celebrated his first birthday. The stories only overlap in that Adela moves into the same shared apartment as Inès (Miriam Correa), who is one of Adela’s daughters. Their problems are the problems of daily life: finding a place to live or a job; money trouble; sibling rivalry; overcoming disease or loss and coping with one’s children or siblings.

 

For about a third of the film, actions are shown in split screen or what the director refers to as "polyvision" (recalling the technique invented for Abel Gance’s influential 1927 classic Napoléon). Here it consists of dividing the widescreen image into two halves, showing contemporary events from two different angles on the left and the right of the screen, with the cameras often placed at a ninety degree angle and encompassing more than one space (for example a kitchen and the dining room next to it, with the characters’ movement from one to the other showing how they are connected).

 

In this age of reality TV sensationalism, the split screen footage at first seem to recall the prying camera images from the Big Brother house, though La soledad’s story of several women trying to get by is so devoid of sensationalism and grounded in everyday life that any hint of sensationalism evaporates quickly and makes way for something more subtle and disturbing.

When a character leaves one room and goes into the other, occupying one space in favour of the other while both spaces continue to be shown on screen, it amplifies the physical presence of the character by also showing the absence of it elsewhere, which is an apt visual metaphor for Rosales’s story of people as islands or separate entities that might want to connect but never really do.

 

La soledad radiates with the intensity yet the normality of daily life as few films do. It is Big Brother without the sensationalism, a soap without the artifice and a documentary without the wobbly camerawork and dark interiors. Remarkably, Rosales’s rigid sense of composition and impeccable attention to technical detail (the images, the sound design, the elliptical editing) actually help to locate it in an everyday reality rather than elevate it into the realms of art and artifice.