La Soledad by Jaime Rosales

Modern-day Madrid, the lives of two families and some friends who, despite their ties, remain in isolation. They are trapped in a double-edged loneliness, at once spiritual and physical. Jaime Rosales has excluded all music from this film, throughout which we only hear the sounds of daily life and the often ambiguous dialogue. No over-sentimentality in this drama, which uses not one but two stories typical of the genre in order to reduce events to their bare skeleton. Nothing enables us to envisage the disaster which is to come. At Rosales house, there is no visible symptom, only the illness as it is.

The remarkable usage of the split screen technique proves to be a formal way of exploring loneliness, beyond the details of the plot. The montage loses its function of putting things in relation to one another : different places, different people. Instead of montage, we have the simultaneity of two isolated spaces. One can guess that they are close, but only through the clue provided by the entrance and exit of the characters in and out of the frame. We know that they are close physically, but feel that there is an infinite distance separating them. The loneliness in this film is not, as in Asian cinema, the simple consequence of a lack of communication. Here the people talk a lot, but in vain. This is an illness without a solution. Nevertheless, it’s always better to live through it with someone.

Carlos Marques

Pierre Trouvé