An unexperienced director, Santiago Tabernero got himself a nice cast of Spanish actresses -the older ones, mainly- and ended up with a correctly directed movie that is absolutely dragged down by the very poor script.
The main sin of this movie is relying on every single cliché that burdens the last ten years of Spanish movies: 1. The main character is a kid in the trance of passing to adolescence. 2. It's located in the last years of the Spanish dictatorship. 3. There's the two granddads with the old feud from the civil war. 4. Ultradepressed family with tragic, extra-sordid subplot. 5. The "new attitudes" of interracial friendship and women rebellion against conventions.
These themselves aren't the ingredients for failure, but it's the absolutely flat and one-sided treatment that blows it. All characters are unidimensional and predictable, with a total lack of drama. They never question their choices. Even the main role progresses from loser to "not a misfit" without much stress. One of the best actresses, Carmen Machi, has got the chance to deepen into the contradictions of her character and the remorse from her bad deeds, but the plot immediately drives her character into the rails, forgets about it and gets back to the more obvious outcomes. Add to it the bad metaphors (the scary tunnel the guy has to cross to getting to school, the unfinished building stopped in the post-war era, the black dead tree...), the excess of bad timed heartwarming and average bad acting and you got it made for one of the best examples of the dreads that ballast Spanish cinema.
The main sin of this movie is relying on every single cliché that burdens the last ten years of Spanish movies: 1. The main character is a kid in the trance of passing to adolescence. 2. It's located in the last years of the Spanish dictatorship. 3. There's the two granddads with the old feud from the civil war. 4. Ultradepressed family with tragic, extra-sordid subplot. 5. The "new attitudes" of interracial friendship and women rebellion against conventions.
These themselves aren't the ingredients for failure, but it's the absolutely flat and one-sided treatment that blows it. All characters are unidimensional and predictable, with a total lack of drama. They never question their choices. Even the main role progresses from loser to "not a misfit" without much stress. One of the best actresses, Carmen Machi, has got the chance to deepen into the contradictions of her character and the remorse from her bad deeds, but the plot immediately drives her character into the rails, forgets about it and gets back to the more obvious outcomes. Add to it the bad metaphors (the scary tunnel the guy has to cross to getting to school, the unfinished building stopped in the post-war era, the black dead tree...), the excess of bad timed heartwarming and average bad acting and you got it made for one of the best examples of the dreads that ballast Spanish cinema.
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