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SEVILLE 2016

La película de nuestra vida: Summer hours

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- Enrique Baró Ubach’s first film, presented in the New Waves section of the Seville European Film Festival, is an exercise in nostalgia that exudes love for the cinema and that playful summer spirit

La película de nuestra vida: Summer hours

Most of us film buffs did the same thing as children: after watching a film that we enjoyed with an intensity unique to childhood, we would take any opportunity to re-enact the adventures of Tarzan, the Wild West or any band of pirates with our friends. The cinema captured our hearts when we were still wet behind the ears, and in this artificial paradise we found the most wondrous escape from reality imaginable. The protagonists of La película de nuestra vida [+see also:
trailer
interview: Enrique Baró
film profile
]
, three men representing three different generations, play at films just like we used to (recreating scenes from Platoon or from the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone), but, unlike our child selves, their references are stars from many different eras, demonstrating the immortality of cinema. It’s the first film by 40-year-old Barcelona native Enrique Baró Ubach, premiering in the New Waves section of the Seville European Film Festival.

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As the director emphasises right from the opening credits of the film, shooting for La pelicula de nuestra vida actually began in 1953: that’s the year in which many of the images from well-known films that form its narrative framework were first created. Here, in a family summer house, in a present seeped in nostalgia, they weave together to reconstruct lost ways of life and moments from the past. Baró himself makes a few fleeting on-screen appearances, manipulating the collated images, submerged in the swimming pool or announcing the end of the performance, like a final curtain, before setting about picking up the pieces of the party that has just played out before our eyes.

The film, unapologetically influenced by Olivier Assayas’s splendid Summer Hours [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
,revels in a kind of sunny nostalgia that eschews kitschy longing, instead characterised by a desire to freeze time, to forever capture the dolce far niente of the summertime and call up the spirits of those immortalised by the family’s very first cameras. It’s a film about passion: passion for the memories, and the symbols of those memories, that have persisted from generation to generation.

Portraying the three big kids of the saga are Teodoro Baró Rey (the grandfather, played by the director’s own father), Francesc Garrido (who we saw recently in L’ adopció [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Daniela Fejerman
film profile
]
) and young actor Nao Albert Roig. They are joined, as well as by all their cinematic ancestors appearing in the old film footage, by the guests at the Karaoke party that provides the film’s final scenes, a specialist who “dies” expertly during the celluloid-inspired games and three dancers/mermaids/muses who recreate moments from the past as captured by the old photographs, providing a feminine counterbalance to the men of the family.

La película de nuestra vida (whose international sales are being managed by All I Need is Money) ends up infusing us with the same spirit of playfulness that radiates all through the film. While its protagonists throw themselves, like boisterous children, into ping-pong matches, board games and dips in the pool, or delight in being reunited with dusty old boxes full of film magazines, sticker albums or Famous Five books, it is impossible not to feel a deep and enjoyable empathy.... Unless, of course, you are one of those people who never played at films.

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(Translated from Spanish)

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