September without delay is the 7th film that I have seen by Jonas Trueba, I know his themes, his obsessions and his particular taste for putting metafilmic reflections where there was not necessarily a need for them… So I was on conquered territory and I really liked this September without delay, which this time is placed under the sign of recovery and Kierkegaard.
The film tirelessly repeats the same scene: “we separate, but everything is fine, we have a party on September 22, the last day of summer, it's a bit like a marriage in reverse” and this for two hours. Except that the more the scene is repeated, the more we see that it is not the same scene, that the characters change, that they evolve, that their relationship evolves… At the beginning they seem too close to really separate, they act shopping together, they visit apartments together, make their party plans… have fun… sleep together… and little by little we see them alone, arguing, we feel that something is perhaps actually broken in them.
We were in disbelief, a bit like their friends and family, and little by little the reality of the separation seemed to get closer.
And if we never saw this couple when they were at their best, we still saw a certain alchemy, an alchemy which disappeared little by little. There is something very sad about seeing them repeat the same sentences over and over, especially “everything is fine”, when we can see that it is less and less true.
There is something deeply touching about feeling the reality of separation drawing closer… Packing boxes… deciding who gets to keep what…
So we're in a Trueba film, so all of that is not necessarily “realistic”, there is a little story-telling aspect to this story, which prevents it from making it totally compelling and that's what ultimately makes the outcome credible. I admit that I could almost have shed a tear (almost, here we are among virile men who don't cry) when they watch the videos of their vacation in Paris and she says this magnificent sentence to him:
why don't you kiss me?
In short, the characters in Trueba's films continue to grow, to make their lives and after the moment when they buy a house in the previous film, we are at the moment where there is the temptation to separate and where a choice must be made. .
Beautiful film.
