‘ESMORZA AMB MI’: Valuable radiography of heartbreak in unbeliented times | Cinema: premieres and criticism

Although it will be configured as an exercise closer to political drive than emotional or sexual introspection, Survey about lovedocumentary directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1964, tried to look out the collective soul of Italy of his time, a microphone in hand and sustained image to some palms of the face. In ESMORZA AMB MI (breakfast with me)debut in the film direction of the until now screenwriter and playwright Iván Morales, and adaptation of his own play, that Pasolini film is not only explicitly cited, but also acts as a symbolic axis to define one of his characters: a Catalan documentary that investigates his reverse, the heartbreak. A company, in both cases, dedicated to the impossible. Is anyone able to understand such abyss?

With a cross -stories structure that follow each other sequentially – four personal stories that develop between 20 and 35 minutes, with constant connections between each of the roles -, Breakfast with me It enrolls in a peculiar commercial film line tending to independence. A production arising from the margins that, in one of its narrative threads, also reflects on the tension between radical authenticity and integration into the system, in the channel of mainstream. And a creative work with excellent interpretations of Anna Alarcón, Álvaro Cervantes, Marina Salas and Iván Massagué, who plays with the changes of audiovisual and narrative formats – of the mobile in vertical to the panoramic screen; From chamber testimonies as a false documentary to pure and hard fiction – while articulating a reflection that flees from the theoretician to dive into the practical.

In the first story, with the encounter between the documentary filmmaker who has been temporarily prevented in a wheelchair after an accident and the promising musician who folded to easy money, the symbolism of breakfast is already articulated as a summit of complicity as a couple. He, romantic, direct, emotional, messenger of songs with which to share sensibilities, makes an orange juice to her after a night of sex and urges her because “if vitamins will not go.” She, unbelievable, cliché with legs against any tenderness, it is not known whether she hurts, gangrenned or fully convinced of the shit of life as a couple, he ends up saying goodbye to home because the mornings are not interested, only the nights. In fact, the fictional character approaches the documentary format as erroneous as possible: with the theory already composed; Looking for voices that are confirmed on the screen. He does not want to understand heartbreak, he just wants me to assert him that love is disaster. And he does not understand that this is not a documentary, but a pamphlet.

Luckily, Morales does not play in his film with the theories of his creature. Displays his story through good, close and unbelief that has happened to it fatal in life, but who has decided not to hate or lock themselves. People knowing that the worst heartbreak is not to love oneself. Even so, the director also understands that the speech Wonderful seats It cannot be more trilero too many times, and that anyone has skids, falls and sinking in their kindness. That everything is much more complex than the pastel color with which they paint it, and that even the good soul that Massagué interprets (cousin brother of Philip Seymour Hoffman of Magnolia) He is able to behave with ruin when fear assails him. The fear of heartbreak.

With some time when physical and verbal exaggeration clouds somewhat delicacy, Breakfast with me It is one of the (apparently) small Spanish films that have been released in the last month and a half, and confirming the estimated general panorama around our first -time filmmakers.