In his previous film, a kind of documentary that literally cannibalized itself, Victor Iriarte I imagined a vampire story built on everything that was behind the screen, on the other side of what is visible, precisely in the exact place where bloodsuckers live: the darkness. In its persistent and somewhat excessive efforts, the film aspired to its disappearance, to its complete invisibility. Its title, correspondingly, could not be other than ‘Invisible‘. Now, Iriarte insists. Perhaps his gesture is not so radical, but it is just as profound. ‘Especially at night’his first fiction, also seeks gestures in silence, he also entertains himself with hidden stories and, in his own way and from the same title, he claims for himself the space of the quiet, the dark, the mysterious.
‘Especially at night‘It is a film, above all, sad; above all, actresses; above all, honda. And this, about a history, above all, unjustly forgotten. But, ‘Especially at night’ It is, above all else, lucid cinema that wonders about the past to find the hidden keys to the present and, who knows, the future. Said like this, it seems above all complicated and, in reality, It is very simple in its clarity, in its depth and even in its timeliness.
The film follows the trail of a mother (Lola Dueñas) determined to find another mother (Ana Torrent). They are united by the same son (Manuel Egozkue). The first gave birth to him, he was stolen from her during the Franco regime and given to the second. With this starting point, the director builds an itinerant story (which is also one of discovery) with the soul of ‘noir’ that travels from Spain to Portugal. It is melodrama with the same insistence as ‘thriller‘, is an adventure film with the clarity of a musical. There are robberies and dancing; There is tragedy and laughter. It is basically a film that, like vampires, becomes its own misfortune, which is also its eternity.
To avoid misunderstandings, ‘Especially at night’ It is not a political film, no matter how evident its obviously political intention may be. It is not about settling scores, but about kicking them out, which, although it may seem the same, it is not. The film navigates in a figurative and even real sense through the interior of fractured lives. And it does so not so much to solve an enigma as to dwell on the strange mystery of motherhood, loss and, if necessary, love. The theft of children, the last great taboo of the Transition, is both the argument and the excuse, the reason and the metaphor. What is ultimately settled is the necessarily complex and tight network of dependencies that makes us be what we are, or what we want to be, or what we have no choice but to be. It sounds lyrical and, indeed, it is. It is poetic and, although it may seem like a contradiction, it is political for that very reason.
Be that as it may, what counts is the delicate and precise way in which ‘Especially at night’ It is built from a timeless reality that speaks of identity (whether that of the protagonists or, for that matter, of an entire country) and recognition; of the memory recovered and the time spent (or lost). The works of both Dueñas and Torrent and the newcomer Egozkue surprise with their sincerity and their almost mimetic ability to adapt to a narrative that wants to be documentation of reality and enthusiastic confabulation; proof and refutation at the same time. The film opens with a mirror-like quote from Roberto Bolaños and it is no coincidence. ‘Especially at night’ It is, above all, very sad and extremely lucid in its very visible desire to break a taboo, to end the invisibility of the unforgivable. Without a doubt, the miracle of Spanish cinema of the year.