Something similar to childhood has ended up happening with youth. It lasts longer and has more literature and more cultural bonuses to this. The first reaction to the phenomenon is inevitably of a moral nature. That if we are infantilizing ourselves, that if we refuse to assume responsibilities, that if there is a lack of character for God’s sake… From there to taking out the Logse (whatever this is) as a throwing weapon there is always a step. And yet, as soon as we relax, he also admits the opposite reading: what need is there to show off as an adult if what he expects is a tiny apartment, a rather ridiculous average salary and a highly probable divorce? Someone once said that childhood is actually a recent invention. Before, in fact, there were no children but adult projects to educate. Bill Bryson in his book At home’It is not so radical and remember that the parents portrayed by Dickens, for example, cried as inconsolably as those now when their son scratched his knees. What could be new, however, is the mystification of the matter; the transformation of childhood into dogma and of motherhood as a consumer good to be fulfilled personally (or, what is more serious, as a political project).
Well, we are on our way to turning what comes before adulthood into something similar. not so simple lifeof Felix Viscarret, It is located right in that space increasingly populated by sad forty-year-olds. Let’s note that what nothing ago was placed in the 30 barrier, now it has moved a whole decade. If we think, for example, of Beautiful girlsthe half-pedophile fable of Ted Demme that swept the 90s, what we find is a thirty-something in crisis unable to decide between dedicating his life to playing the piano (as a symptom of his clinging to the dreams of youth) or selling insurance (as a certainty of his entry into vulgarity of life without commercial breaks). Now something similar is happening, not the same, but, it has already been said, in the fourth decade, that he has a lot of fourth dimension.
Viscarret, who had just gotten entangled in the seductive claustrophobic story don’t look in the eyescome back with not so simple life to his deeply humanist cinema and always so close to the generational portrait. And indeed, the odyssey of an architect who long ago dreamed of demonstrating his talent to the world and now all of him lives in the uncertainty of being the one he wanted to be or being the one he has no choice but to be becomes a delicate fable through both sharp and clairvoyant without giving up being somewhat bitter and even delicately funny. The director alternates what could be considered the clichés of the genre with formal discoveries, or lyrical delusions, really brilliant. And in that navigation between the social portrait of a costumbrista character and the dream escape, he succeeds in founding a world that is as personal as it is recognizable. He is a humanist, we said, because of what is particular about him and because of what he presumes is universal.
Miki Esparbé, with his warm and fragile scruff not so much clothing as interpretive, he is undoubtedly the master of ceremonies of this liturgy for old young with anguish in the background. His way of doubting between the father he would have wanted to be and the professional they made him believe he was seems like a whole class of acting on the exact limit of comedy and tragedy, success and failure, the sensitive man and the man insulted, the man who understands women and the man who exploits women.
The result is a film that is as aware of its place in a world of eternal youth as it is critical of the budgets it manages; a film that moves with solvency and good taste through the keys of a drama that leans shamelessly and very convinced towards farce, always in a happy balance. Let’s say that the film loses some of its momentum when it is carried away by the tendency to show off a moral (the true meaning of success and those things) and grows, and a lot, when it deliberately loses until it approaches the simply abstract. The recurring image of the skaters at night infects everything with a rare sensation of miracle, stupor and sleep.