‘Rita’: Valladolid Review

Dir/scr: Paz Vega. Spain. 2024. 94mins

Extending an performing portfolio that has taken her from the Spanish auteur cinema of Julio Medem to Rambo V: Final Blood,  Paz Vega brings it again dwelling together with her refined and potent directorial debut, a Eighties childhood drama which is about in Vega’s hometown of Seville. Mixing rose-tinted nostalgia with the darkish theme of gender violence means strolling a difficult tightrope, however Rita’s genuine consideration to element, tremendous performances and punctiliously honed atmospherics make it work, merging the kid’s-eye view with the grownup perspective on that childhood. 

Refined and potent

That, along with the movie’s transfer away from the simplistic vacationer view of the town to disclose the violent patriarchal constructions on which it’s constructed, ought to assist awaken fest curiosity past Locarno, the place it premiered, and Valladolid, the place it performs out of competitors.

Rita opens with the sound of a whirring fan, simply one among its many small summertime-in-Seville particulars. Faculty’s out for summer time and seven-year-old Rita (Sofía Allepuz) and her timid, delicate little brother Lolo (Alejandro Escamilla), of whom she is fiercely protecting, are determined to move for the seaside. 

Their mom Mari (Vega) has the gaunt, haunted look of somebody in fixed ache – and certainly she is, struggling perpetual verbal and bodily abuse by the hands of her taxi driver husband, the balding, moustachioed and terminally machista Jose Manuel (Roberto Alamo).  Jose Manuel’s brooding, terrible presence will be felt even when he’s not there, although area is made for one scene of tenderness that reveals he isn’t a pure monster. 

Nice care is taken to not sentimentalise Rita; in her first position, Allepuz retains the character actual by way of sideways observations and awkward questions. However although the movie is seen by way of Rita’s eyes, that is maybe Mari’s story, as a girl dwelling not just below her husband’s thumb however beneath the regime of Franco, lingering on previous his demise.

“When your husband seeks distractions,” the radio informs the ladies of Spain, “it means he’s wholesome.” Divorce in Spain has simply been made authorized and, hesitantly, Mari units about calling a lawyer to make enquiries – a rebellious and harmful act in itself. Delicate parallels are made between Mari’s desires of escape, and people of Rita and Lolo – whether or not to the seaside or into an imagined land of cowboys, the place they go when Jose Manuel’s anger turns into an excessive amount of for them.

Rita enters a barely off-kilter friendship with Nito (Daniel Navarro), the son of a neighbour, with whom she’ll have her first, early style of what a summer time romance may sooner or later appear like – although this, like every little thing else in Rita, is permeated by a way of peril and sorrow.

Life within the streets of a working-class Seville barrio in 1984 is authentically rendered, and the sense that Vega’s personal childhood is being faithfully recorded comes over loud and clear. We get the World Cup of that 12 months constantly on the radio, the fairground visits, cash being thrown from balconies to the gitano on the street beneath, along with his goat balanced on a stool. We get the itinerant knife-grinder, whose position within the movie will change into extra than simply native color, and a uncommon scene of unbridled pleasure during which Rita begins to discover ways to dance flamenco from her Aunt Merche (Amada Santos): the implication being that dance is just not one thing that’s allowed to occur at dwelling. 

Rita is let down, although, by its occasional reliance on cliché. Bins are duly ticked by a toddler having fun with the texture of the wind on her face by way of an open automobile window, and by a vertical shot of children staring up on the sky and discovering shapes within the clouds. Pablo Cervantes’ rating is easy and touching however overused, bringing one or two scenes dangerously near mawkishness in a movie which has in any other case managed to sidestep the sentimental.