D’A Film Festival ‘Las Largas Sombras’/’Past Lies’ Review: Death on the Spanish Coastline in this Queer Coming-Of-Age Series
The first episode of ‘Las Largas Sombras’ (streaming on Hulu as ‘Past Lies’) made its spectacular debut at Barcelona’s D’A Film Festival.
The highly anticipated miniseries adaptation of the bestselling Spanish novel Las Largas Sombras premiered its first episode at the D’A Film Festival during a ceremony attended by the director and cast members. Spanish director Clara Roquet was given immense responsibility with the show, and she not only managed to craft a visual language that feels like a warm love letter to Spanish culture but also a compelling and jaw-dropping portrait of the dimensions of womanhood and youth. The show easily goes toe-to-toe with the oft-compared Big Little Lies.
The series follows a group of women 25 years after the mysterious disappearance of one of their classmates, Mati (Laura Wedel), on an end-of-year school trip to the island of Mallorca. Mati’s older sister, police officer Paula Rios (the gripping Irene Escolar), could never quite accept her sister’s disappearance as just that. When Mati’s remains wash up on the Mallorcan coastline, then, she begins to investigate the group of women after hearing they bullied her younger sister. As the first episode shows us, though, to make assumptions is the biggest sin you can commit in this story. Through memories, old photographs and videos, and gaps in recollection, Paula and the women race in tandem to answer the question of what truly happened to Mati all those years ago.
Roquet immediately establishes a gripping visual language for both the present and the past as the backdrop for this story. Aptly, the flashbacks to Mallorca are full of a specific hormonal nostalgia, with twinkling party lights and moon-struck oceansides beautifully colliding with the bursting sun and glinting waters. It is all so richly colored that your mouth starts to water at the thought of more well-funded directors having half of Roquet’s visual intelligence. The scenes in the present feel full of love and tenderness, as the liveliness of Spanish culture is on full display: there are parades of festively dressed performers, the cozy wood floors of dusty childhood homes, and the ocean, still glimmering but now a bit more faintly, as the girls have grown up into women and buried their secrets in their not-so-distant past.
It is in this sacred crib of the landscape that we are introduced to the main group of old high school friends, whose houses are pasted with wallpaper that seems one tug away from falling all the way off. There’s the tender-hearted and painfully empathetic Lena (Lorena López as an adult and Miriam Rubio as a teenager), the seemingly put-together Teresa (Belén Cuesta as an adult, Lucía Caraballo as a teenager) — who is shown actively cheating on her boyfriend in one of her first scenes — and the bustling Carmen (Ana Rayo as an adult, Ana de Alva as a teenager), a now-successful local realtor who deals with substance abuse. There’s also aspiring politician and abuse cycle-breaker Soledad (Marta Etura as an adult, Andrea López as a teenager) and Candela, played by the dazzling Itziar Atienza as an adult and the equally captivating Marina Orta as a teenager. A personal favorite, Candela is now a shrewd lawyer whose feelings for one of the other group members remain just as passionate and full-fledged as the day they all disbanded, and it’s she who has the most emotionally resonant plotline throughout the series. Finally, we have Rita Montero (Elena Anaya as an adult and Isa Montalbán as a teenager), a now-famous film director who has recently arrived back in town with her girlfriend to clean out her family home, fresh off the back of the death of her mother. Each woman seems fairly similar to, if pared down from, the teenagers they used to be, and as a viewer, it is all the more delicious to find out all the reasons how and why.
Each one of these women is brought to the screen with such understanding and fervor that they all seem like both suspects and victims, allowing the audience to play along with the drama while also looking inward to analyze the mystery. The group of women are faced with a double shock with the return of Rita and the announcement, via a stony-eyed Paula, that Mati’s remains have been found. Each woman elicits both suspicion and confusion, leaving the viewer to wonder on whose hands drops of Mati’s blood remain.
The highlight of the opening episode is, undoubtedly, the captivating Rita. In her final scene in the episode, her turmoil hits boiling point, and Anaya’s sublime acting climaxes. Rita experiences a panic attack; the culmination of guilt for what happened to Mati and flashbacks to her being closeted and desperate to be out wash over her. It’s the most realistic panic attack I’ve ever seen on screen; she weeps and crumples to the floor while almost falling in on herself, the scene interpolating with her memories of the trip to Mallorca. As a queer person, the nauseating feeling of lingering wounds that were thrust upon us by the hetero- & cis-normative world we live in — wounds that weren’t ours to mend or receive, so painful to stitch up — is evoked so carefully and relatably that I felt tears falling as the house lights turned on.
In Las Largas Sombras, Roquet proves her commitment to interior realism in respect to the lives of these women. What’s more, every single actress, whether playing young or older roles, is similarly committed to crafting a cohesive picture of these women’s youthful impulses and the long-buried secrets that now bubble to the surface — making Las Largas Sombras both a visual and emotional spectacle.
Las Largas Sombras is now available to stream on Hulu in the US.
Lucy Kerr’s ‘Family Portrait’ is an Omen
Lucy Kerr’s debut feature zooms in on the tense goings-on of a white American family as they prepare for the most exhibitionist ritual of all: taking a family portrait.
There’s an underlying chittering throughout Family Portrait: birds weep and wane throughout the film, and there’s a beat to it that soars and quiets until we’re exposed to the tender underbelly of inside life. Written and directed by New York City-based creative Lucy Kerr, Family Portrait (which won the Locarno Film Festival’s Boccalino d’Oro award for Best Director) is a distanced look at the tense goings-on of a white American family as they prepare for the most exhibitionist ritual of all: taking a group photo.
Family Portrait takes us through a day in the life of a Texan family, specifically following Katy (a brilliantly disjointed Deragh Campbell). Katy is quite obviously the black sheep of the family, dressed plainer, speaking louder and more disjointed, and not exactly understanding the social playbook of manners everyone else seems to go by. Set in a sprawling Texas mansion that exudes the subdued opulence of generational wealth, Family Portrait makes us privy to scenes of kids playing pretend with cousins they see once a year, men chatting gruffly about politics, and daughters lounging about in dolled-up boredom. Katy’s mother Barbara (Silvana Jakich) has brought together the entire clan for a family portrait to be taken in their backyard, but when Barbara seemingly disappears after receiving a phone call about the death of a cousin, Katy sets off on a property-wide search to find her. On the way, she slowly unravels until her words become repetitive and obsessive, the magical realist potential of her childhood home reveals itself, and the barren marsh nearby starts to look a little too inviting.
Family Portrait is full of the subtle nuances that are universal to every family gathering, weaving a tender web of relatability: there are scenes of men in lawn chairs fully clothed, waiting for the others to give them directions on what to do; older members shouting off far-fetched conspiracies as if fact to the younger members, who sarcastically appease them; and girls wandering off and playing make-believe under the porch. Of course, there is also a grandfather sharing stories of his grandfather — memories we never see, as we only watch him telling them.
Lucy Kerr’s direction in her first film shines just as bright as her writing. Every choice adds to the insular feeling of being not just a fly on the wall but a member of the family (albeit, one that goes unnoticed during discussions and spaces out when spoken to, much like our protagonist). Cinematographer Lidia Nikonova’s frames look like moving paintings, as Kerr masterfully chooses to craft scenes in which the actors move around a stationary camera — a deeply refreshing encapsulation of the hustle and bustle of a full house. The film is ambient, beats held for a moment too long, as if every moment, no matter how minuscule, is something you must savor and sit in. In the way it captures the mundane so efficiently, Family Portrait is reminiscent of Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby.
All these details swirl together to wean the question out of the audience: what, in the abstract, is a family portrait? For the little girl-doll I once was, family portraits were a performance. I was placed in whatever my mother deemed the most beautiful (and flattering) dress, my hair curled to a crisp, every one of my features aligned, and my breath held. This portrait would be seen by all the other parishioners, and not a single outward detail could give away the monster that lurked beneath the surface of my mother, or the bruises, both corporeal and spiritual, that my father and I caked over with disassociation and fake smiles.
As I began to interact with whiteness in my conservative hometown, I began to see that family portraits were always similar tools for perception: highly stylized and contrived photos to be printed on Christmas cards, gimmicky family reunion t-shirts, and hung in frames over sprawling foyers as if to say, “Look at us and be in awe of our normalcy, how perfect we are, even behind closed doors.” But if Lucy Kerr’s debut feature is anything, it’s a warning: tend to the weeds in this garden of souls before they all rot before your eyes.
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