The 72nd San Sebastián Film Festival was a vital showcase for Spanish-language cinema: of the 16 films in competition, six were in Spanish. Yet there's no denying that the Golden Shell—the festival's top prize—went to the right place with Albert Serra's documentary Tardes de soledad, despite the controversy that preceded it.
Animal rights groups had demanded its exclusion from competition, fearing it would celebrate bullfighting. But Serra's film is neither for nor against the spectacle. In depicting Peruvian matador Andrés Roca, Serra employs a precise, repetitive style: when the torero drives, he's always filmed head-on from the same angle; in the arena, the camera stays fixed on him—whether waiting or performing—avoiding wide shots. We watch his gestures and expressions with the intensity of an actor, see his arrogance and pain; even the ritual of dressing in his hotel room becomes ceremony.
This approach may yield somewhat to fascination with his figure, but it remains fundamentally an aesthetic representation without moral judgment. Which is precisely why those who see the torero as a hero will find material to confirm their belief, while those who regard bullfighting as barbaric will see it rendered mechanical, almost to the point of tedium—a freedom of interpretation left entirely to the viewer by a director offering an artistic experience rather than a replica of reality.
Among the films it's a shame to see unrewarded is Costa-Gavras's latest, Le dernier souffle, adapted from an essay (unpublished in Italy) and presented as fiction, with names changed: the writer Fabrice Toussaint (based on Régis Debray, played by Denis Podalydès) and the physician Augustin Masset (based on Claude Grange, played by Kad Merad) confront each other over the subject of palliative care.
The writer meets the doctor after a check-up and grows interested in his difficult work with the terminally ill—partly from curiosity, partly from fear about his own test results. Through the doctor's memories, and then by following his patients in care, we discover how he tries to relate to those with no hope of recovery, and to their families. The core problem: many expect to be cured, or at least to have every possible attempt made until the end. Sometimes this stubbornness blinds not just families but patients themselves. For many, accepting a dignified journey toward an unavoidable death is unbearable, as though something still holds them back. Others suffer more in the mind than the spirit, or simply want to be attended with the greatest possible dignity.
Story after story—each told with simplicity and honesty, without unnecessary melodrama or emotional blackmail—we receive a genuine philosophical education in how to face death, learning to approach it with serenity or at least without needless physical and psychological suffering. Rigorous cinema, and genuinely useful: the clear and engaged gaze of a master filmmaker in his nineties on illness and life's end.
Another great director in competition was Mike Leigh (past winner at Cannes and Venice), who in Hard Truths constructs a series of small family dramas around Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a "difficult" woman: bad-tempered, antisocial, obsessed with hygiene, probably clinically depressed. She has a terrible relationship with her husband and a worse one with her son, a twenty-two-year-old who neither studies nor works. Even with her sister, a single mother of two, she rarely finds common ground.
The portrayal of family distress in an ordinary contemporary British household—especially the conflicts never explicitly addressed and therefore never treated—is meticulous, as though considerable work went into making this dysfunctional family nuanced and credible, with the care not to explain everything in forced fashion, particularly the characters' pasts.
Unfortunately, the same care isn't evident in the visual approach: the cinematography has a flat, characterless light, and the images possess no cinematic beauty. The frequent close-ups, rather than heightening the characters' drama, seem like a television convention designed to avoid showing rooms and landscapes. It's a film with a strong script, especially in how characters are built, but not nearly as fine to look at.