Anita no pierde el tren by Ventura Pons

After a string of personal films, Anita no pierde el tren marked Spanish director Ventura Pons’ return to comedy and a more marketable style of filmmaking. Nonetheless, in its depiction of a 50-year-old box office clerk losing her job and embarking on her first love affair, Anita represents an admirable and rare attempt to explore the fears, desires and sexuality of an older woman. It also resists a happy ending, allowing the film’s themes of loneliness, ageing and longing to remain honestly unresolved.

What’s unfortunate is that this is executed in a bland, illustrative way that leaves little room for the viewer’s imagination. In some ways comparable to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie, which was released the same year, the film puts us inside its lonely protagonist’s state of mind using various playful techniques: narration, fantasy, directly addressing the camera and even at one point an animated dream sequence. In both films, there is a feeling of being led by the hand as a viewer, with your guide loudly pointing at and explaining everything to you. When Anita realises that “love is a first class feeling that must be lived”, we are told this, but never allowed to feel it.

Unlike Amelie, Anita has none of the aesthetic flair and passion that makes such manipulative techniques tolerable. Instead, these elements feel like fashionable strategies for involving the audience in an otherwise unfashionable story of middle-aged alienation.

Donal Foreman