The latest film by Jonás Trueba—who visited the Midnight Sun Film Festival with his father Fernando in 2016—begins in the immediate aftermath of a separation. Trueba’s frequent collaborators, both in acting and writing, Itsaso Arana and Vito Sanz, play Ale and Alex, a couple who part ways on such good terms that they decide to throw a party to celebrate their breakup. After all, Ale’s father (the great Fernando Trueba) has always said that one should celebrate breakups rather than marriages. Or has he?
When the moment of truth arrives, the fatherly advice turns out to be more about striving to become a better person and seeking happiness—by reading Søren Kierkegaard and the cinematic philosopher Stanley Cavell. Film and philosophy, it seems, can help make us better human beings, though fortunately, they don’t eliminate our human clumsiness and hesitation.
Presented at the Cannes Film Festival’s Quinzaine des Cinéastes, the film is deliberately redundant and sympathetically timeless. Its impossibly comfortable ex-lovers process their split by recounting the breakup and their celebratory party in everyday conversations with friends, family, and colleagues—as if social media didn’t exist.
Though the Scandinavian master of divorce cinema, Ingmar Bergman, is mentioned, Trueba’s emotional tone leans more toward the summery, bittersweet sensibility of Éric Rohmer than Bergman’s stark bitterness.
Tytti Rantanen