Jonas Trueba, a filmmaker between craftsmanship and collective work

Since 2020, Spain has been exporting with Jonas Trueba, 42, with his wise boy look and the stubbornness of a possessed artist, a new international candidate for the elections of the leading Iberian author. In the sunny shadow of the patriarch Pedro Almodovar, given the difficult situation of Spanish cinema in his own country and the restrictive reception of foreign cinematographies in other territories, there are not so many who can claim it. In France, we hardly see anyone but Rodrigo Sorogoyen (The Beasts2022) and Albert Serra (Pacification. Torment on the Islands2022) to afford it. Spotted at the La Roche-sur-Yon International Film Festival (Vendée) by the distributor Arizona, who has remained loyal to him since then, Jonas Trueba joins them today, creating for himself, film after film, a community of aficionados among us.

Eva in August (2019), or the languid and summery drift of a lonely young woman in Madrid. Who besides us? (2021), or a cinema experience shared over five years with a group of teenagers from the capital. Come and see (2022), or the rural exile not without embarrassment of a young couple after the Covid-19 pandemic. These are the stages of a French rise that should find today with September without waiting a kind of apotheosis. This film, which delighted spectators at the Quinzaine des Cinémas in Cannes in May, is a delicious and devious comedy of remarriage, to date his most charming, subtle and unifying film.

Ale (Itsaso Arana) and Alex (Vito Sanz), who have reached the end of their long romantic relationship, decide, half-confidently, to separate. Launched as a joke, the idea of ​​organizing a party to mark the occasion socially and show the couple’s exemplary maturity with regard to the pitiful catastrophe that a separation more or less always is will occupy the entire film. Delightful in itself, and without the viewer needing to look any further, this strange idea nevertheless emerges with three distinct leads.

That of cinephilia, through the revival of a genre constitutive of Hollywood classicism, to which the philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926-2018) gave its letters of nobility – a collection of his essays, under the title Does cinema make us better? (2003), has just been reissued in French by Vrin editions. The more intimate one, of the filmmaker’s own lineage, since his father, Fernando, who plays in the film, was before him, that it was he who instilled in him the love of American comedies and that it is still to him that he owes having heard, around the age of 15, the paradoxical statement of the subject of his film.

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