It is strange how
festival programming could define the destiny of a particular film.
Screened in a wrong selection at the right festival, it could get
lost on the circuit and end up forgotten. This year Ramón
Salazar’s fourth feature Sunday’s Illness serves as a
perfect example: after the premiere at Berlinale’s Panorama and a
very short spring festival tour, it ended up on Netflix (in the
“International” section) in the early summer interesting only to
the niche audience. Great reviews and “word of mouth” did not
help much, so one of the best features of the year is largely
overlooked.
The plot can be
summed up in one sentence: a woman in her 40’s shows up in her
estranged socialite mother’s life with a strange demand that two of
them spend 10 days together in a mountain village and at home the
mother abandoned without looking back. Over the course of days filled
with scarce passive aggressive communication some personal and family
secrets are revealed changing the lives for the both of them.
It all sounds like a
bog standard material to be worked with in either the quiet arthouse
mood piece register or as a more luscious Almodovar-esque
melodrama, but Sunday’s Illness is something special right
from the start. The film opens with a sharp contrast of messiness of
younger Chiara’s (Bárbara Lennie) walk through the wooded
area in the mountains and older Anabel’s (Susi Sánchez)
preparations for hosting a charity dinner at her upscale,
mansion-like home. The forest is wild and threatening, the inside of
the house seems safe, but with more than a hint of rigorousness in
the DOP Ricardo de Garcia’s symmetric framing and tone-down
lighting, while the contrast is highlighted with the women’s hair
colours – raven black and silver, almost white.
Their first
encounter, with Chiara being on of the waitresses at the party and
the very one to pour the last glass of wine before bedtime for
Anabel, is awkward, as is Chiara’s request that will ensue. The
next day, when the request is formally granted, with Chiara signing
the papers stating that she will not seek further compensation,
Anabel’s rich husband (Miguel Ángel Solá) seems relieved,
but Anabel is not so sure what she is getting into. For a good
reason, that is, since she is aware what she had done to her daughter
when the latter was only 8 years old.
It would be bad to
spoil the plot any further, even though the revelation comes at the
two-thirds mark after a stretch of an exceptionally well written,
elaborate banter between the two. Let us just say that Sunday’s
Illness transcends both of the niches, the artsy and the
melodramatic ones, by offering a genuine feeling of the drama with
artistic elegance and striking emotion.
Sunday’s
Illness depends a lot on its actresses, and they are both
brilliant choices for their roles. On the surface, Susi Sánchez
might seem as a link to Almodovar films (at least the last three
where she featured), but here her performance is as strong as it is
nuanced, which makes her character arc compelling. This year might
prove to be crucial also for Bárbara Lennie who appeared in
significant parts in four high-profile titles, including also the
Cannes opener, Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows, but
her performance in Sunday’s Illness leaves the viewer
virtually speechless.
Salazar rarely
misses the step in constructing the story (the dying bird detail is a
tad too blatant character-building stunt for such a subtle work),
while he shines as a director, employing a lot of purely visual
storytelling through the predominantly static shots, with the
excursion to something way wilder than that in the film’s
technically most demanding shot of the two women riding some kind of
cart down the slopes.
It is fair to say
that Sunday’s Illness is one of the best films of the year
for both its formal and narrative merits.
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