Baudelaire wrote that “the Spaniards are very gifted for comedy, although they very quickly reach the cruel.” The Iberian Canon of Cruelty and Wickedness It does not seem to have dissolved since the time of Goya, Buñuel, Saura… which is now ours.
Peter Aguilera It is not illustrious or Aragonese like them, but the four feature films from Donostiarra (The influence2007; Shipwrecks2010 ; To hell with your eyes2017 ; Splendid hotel2023) have enough talent to delve into Numantine mythology and its heartbreaking wounds.
“That’s what he’s talking about The huntfrom Spain,” he told us in the tent that, as leitmotif visual, occupies the center of the narrative. “What is interesting about a remake It’s not that we’re remaking the style, but the historical moment. There are things that haven’t changed at all. The tensions are the same: abuse of power, social resentment, classism, envy, betrayal… There was the shadow of civil war, now there is the shadow of crisis, of procrastination, of real estate speculation…”
Repetition with variations
History is doomed to repeat itself, that is, our capacity for mutual self-destruction. A repetition with variations. With a script by Aguilera himself and Lola Mayo, hunting day returns to the same scene, a hunt for sick rabbits that leads to a hunt for a man… in this case, a woman. The main role is now absolutely female, four Artemises purging their instincts, staging a parable of dehumanization.
In a yellow landscape burned by a sun of justice, where sixty years ago the vision of women was symbolic or imagined (models and magazine photos); where Ismael Merlo, Alfredo Mayo and José María Prada were cooked and torn to pieces like archetypes of Francoist education, under the curious and frightened gaze of Emilio Gutiérrez Caba; now Blanca Portillo, Rossy de Palma and Carmen Machi reproduce the spectacle of our predatory conditionscrutinized by newcomer Zoe Arnao.
The complicity between the actresses that floats in the air is not without an energy rivalry It suits the film well, that it is even sought after. Aguilera and Mayo wrote the script already thinking of their faces and kept their names for the characters. This is also one of the filmmaker’s first intuitions in the founding phases of the film, five years ago.
“My biggest challenge is to preserve my own voice in front of them, so that they don’t swallow me up,” explains. “They take up all the time on screen and I have to find my place, with the dilation of time, the silences, the resources… There is a very clear tension between my voice as a filmmaker and their voice as an actress. They are incredible. The most difficult thing is to control this whirlwind.
In fact, before and after each take, the conversations between director and actresses are not instructions, but dialectics, common research, suggestions, requests and demands.I feel a bit like I’m in one of those ensemble films, like The big meal by Ferreri, where everything ends in the interpretation, in the stars, and where the cinematic remains behind,” says Aguilera.
Zoé Arnao, Rossy de Palma, Aguilera and Blanca Portillo
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The proposal does not go through the austerity and crudeness of the black and white with which Luis Cuadrado photographed Saura’s film. Eva Díaz (The Europeans), in front of the photograph, does not use artificial light, The Extremaduran sun that bathes the farm is captured every day of filming from dawn until three in the afternoon, simulating the passage of hours throughout a day, during which all the action of the drama takes place.
“The film gets darker as it goes on,” Díaz explains. “And we try to create that atmosphere by working with natural elements. The sweat of the actresses is real.” However, the use of several drones, one of which is integrated into the film’s plot, elevates its sophistication to the 21st century. “The tone is not dry and realistic like in Saura’s work. We are building a more buoyant, more liquid world in which anything can happen. The whole film has a fabled energy and the form, somewhat mannered, follows that,” Aguilera explains.
This tone, adds the director, is close to the ironic farce, somewhat traditional, but filtered by the aesthetics of the western and the tension of a thriller. “Even if he is a remake“With a similar structure and script to the original, it is a completely different film,” says Anna Saura, co-producer with Jaime Gona. “That is its great mystery. There are specific dialogues that have a different or even opposite meaning today. It’s an incredible game“. Her involvement in the project adds to the blood affiliations that run through the film, both internally and externally, almost like ghostly presences. “I would say it’s a mirror film,” Aguilera adds. “And, in fact, on a meta-narrative level, The hunt is inside hunting dayin a surprising way that the viewer will have to discover.”
There are not many keys that we were able to unravel on the day of filming, although Blanca Portillo reveals that she plays the niece of José (Merlo), current owner of the farm, sixty years after the massacre filmed by Saura, almost as if it were a documentary about black Spain whose violence resonates again. “Blanca drags the family’s past and, between the three of us, we relive the trauma. Sometimes I think we are one character, like a three-headed monster doomed to self-destruct.” explains the actress.
Among the fortunate filming decisions, the process of deregulation that the story tells, gravitating from comedy to tragedy, is filmed in chronological order. Something that the actresses appreciate.
In the words of Rossy de Palma, they are like three Stradivarius that already come from our home, but “respecting the order of events helps us to give truth to the relationships of the characters, it allows us to function in a very organic way”, because All three of us work with our guts, integrating uncontrollable incidents“. That is, a cow that sneaks into the shot, a dipsomaniacal throat clearing from Carmen (Machi), a twisted gesture in the way Blanca (Portillo) hits her…
Halfway through the six-week shoot, the tensions of the drama begin to surface. Holed up in the shade of the tent, Rosa and Blanca are taking a nap when Rosa and Blanca’s cell phone rings. He walks away and has a tense conversation in the background of the shot. Then return to meditate, reacting to the voice in disabled of his thoughts, a resource that already existed in the original film, which Aguilera reads behind the combo and which Portillo will reproduce in post-production.
Carmen Machi, in a hammock, during a break
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They only need two or three takes per scene. Without big delays. That’s the usual dynamic, they tell us. “Pedro doesn’t like to repeat his shots much and I like that,” Portillo says. “Plus, The long sequence shots make everything more fluid and allow the atmosphere, and not so much the technique, to infiltrate the screen.and this action is always done by reaction.”
old friends
Heat, alcohol and weapons. These are the three elements that break the confinement, just in the next scene, and that focus on Carmen. “My character works for Blanca and they are old friends,” explains Machi before filming the scene in which she photographs a vase located between Blanca and Rosa’s deckchairs. “He has a big drinking problem that is more accentuated than the others. I think he is the most uninhibited character and the one who handles weapons best, but he is really a person who lives in submission and resignation.”
Then, a travels resolved in three attacks, he follows an angry Blanca, approaching Carmen insulting her and ending up slapping her. “Hey, you’re drunk! Do you think we can put up with your drunkenness our whole fucking lives? Are you crazy?” Violence erupts.From now on, we will all lose control. Now the real hunt begins” explains Portillo.
In this transition between comedy and the most primitive cruelty, which, according to Baudelaire, quickly runs through the hot Spanish blood, the days of hunting day. Diana (Arnao) will be, from the viewer’s point of view, a difficult teenager, Rosa’s niece.
“I propose the contrast of three right-wing women who go hunting for a day,” explains newcomer Arnao.My look is young, intellectual and alternativebut in reality my character comes from there, he has it in his blood, and he begins to awaken to this familiar reality from which he cannot escape.
Rossy de Palma adds: “Every three generations, when the survivors of the horrors disappear, the human being suffers amnesia and the darkness reappears. It may be that hunting day talk about it. It will be a very special film“. We couldn’t agree more. Carlos reviriego
