Some time ago, when he won the Goya for champions in 2019, Javier Fesser promised that he would return. That, rather than a simple notice or warning (or, where appropriate, threat), was above all and explicitly the formulation of a wish. With all that the term desire in its carnal evidence implies. The director maintained that from few places so clear and perfect it is possible to talk –carefully– about love. And, consequently, given the relevance of the subject, a second installment was worthwhile. After all, what happens to love (like this, in general) is what happens to the protagonists of the film (like this, in particular): there are a thousand ways to define one and the other, and all of them are insufficient because they are paternalistic, offensive, cheesy, condescending or simply stupid.
But beyond the semantic difficulties, what matters are the possibilities, which are also abysses, that opens up a universe whose only possibility of understanding lies in admitting difference (enough with identity as a pattern of understanding, as Deleuze would say in French ). And if the radicality, by force different from the act of love, acquired a new light from the also radical existence of the, let’s say, disabled person (and we already feel our most evident disability to name)?
Championex with the X at the end is not so much a sequel as a clarification. Or a comment. Or a return to the same. A return, we said. The idea is not so much to continue anything as to refine, clarify and, why not, insist. Few pleasures like persevering in, once again, love. Again, the story is told of a group of people who do what we all do but in their own way. Very in his own way. And in his necessarily different way of acting, that abnormal normality of which we feel so proud is stripped to the cruelest transparency. Again, Fesser manages to compose a comedy that resists compassion with all its might, that abhors emotion understood as a resignation and that, with due skill, avoids sentimentality as an alibi.
Now the story is told not of a basketball team but of a track team. And so that there is not even the slightest doubt of the intentions, he joins the group Brianeitor, probably the only athlete on the planet who neither jumps nor runs nor lifts more weights than his grief. It would be said that Brianeitor is a superhero for the simple pleasure of being contrary. Everything is the result of an error, but not just any, but one of those so huge and happy that it redefines the very possibility of being wrong. Indeed, what is wrong, as it could not be, is the mistake itself. The confused ones are us.
The grace consists, and hence the merit, in returning to the same place but with a completely new language and diction. Fesser, who did not hesitate at the time to erase the border that separates reality from the crazy and anarchic fiction of the comic, now dares to play virtual universes from the carnality of the exciting, from the viscerality of the unique, from the surprise, once again, of the different.