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"We spent several days speaking about our experiences in life regarding the issues that we would later deal with in the film," Anaya said. The Spanish actress plays Amanda, a young woman who, after her son's death, experiences an emotional crisis that distances her from her partner, Javier (Vicuña).Īfter contacting her to propose the project, Bize traveled to Madrid to discuss the details of the story and the characters with her.
LA MEMORIA DEL AGUA SKIN
Santiago, Aug 30 (EFE).- "La memoria del agua" (The Memory of Water), the latest film by Chilean director Matias Bize, "is a dark and profound - but also marvelous - journey" addressing the experience of life and love, said Spanish actress Elena Anaya, who stars in it.Īcknowledged for her work with Pedro Almodovar, Anaya praised Bize and, in remarks to EFE, discussed the details of filming the project, which will begin showing this week in Chile.Īnaya has acted in films such as "Lucia y el sexo," "Van Helsing" (along with Hugh Jackman) and "Dead Fish" (with Gary Oldman), but her image is closely tied to Almodovar after her participation in two of his most highly acclaimed works: "Talk to Her" and "The Skin I Live In."Īnaya is now displaying her dramatic talent with Chilean actor Benjamin Vicuña in "La memoria del agua," the latest work by the director of "The Life of Fish" (2010), which won the Goya and Buñuel awards. "La memoria del agua" is profound journey to love and life, actress says.Their final confrontation, in a wintry forest, is one of the film’s highlights and feels like vintage Bize, with the couple’s minutes-long conversation - which touches on Pedro’s innocence, everyone’s guilt and how being together again would erase Pedro’s existence - unspooling in a sequence of tight shots and reverse shots that underlines the couple’s separate points of view before cutting to a medium two-shot in which the two dark-haired parents face each other, with their wiry figures in black coats almost blending into the background of leafless trees, as if they too had become spectral presences.
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But his presence here hardly qualifies as stunt casting, with Vicuña and his on-screen “non-partner” Anaya, both in their first film with Bize, delivering carefully calibrated, hushed yet emotionally rich work throughout. Thankfully, Anaya and Vicuña, both also credited as co-producers, deliver two emotionally potent performances that help overcome the film’s few weaknesses, with local audiences no-doubt closely watching Vicuña, who lost his own 6-year-old daughter with well-known Argentinean model Pampita in 2012 (the South American press was reportedly in a collective shock). Both events feel more like facile writing shortcuts than occurrences that might have reasonably happened in real life. A couple of occurrences also flirt with a bluntness that’s not typical of Bize’s cinema, including a scene in which Amanda has to translate the medical technicalities of drowning at a doctors’ congress and another in which Javier has to buy a present for the child of a friend who’s also a four-year-old boy. But the focus is squarely on Javier, an architect, and, to a lesser extent his Spanish interpreter partner, Amanda, with the narrative not entirely on an even keel, occasionally cleaving closer to his rather than her point of view.
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Though the film is clearly an intimate character drama, Bize uses interactions with a small cast of supporting characters to explore ideas such as the home as a place of memories or the depressing notion that even a parent can never know everything about their child. In a pleasingly unifying turn, liquids play a large role throughout, as does snow. In the space of not even a minute and using something as commonplace as soy milk (though the link between milk and parenthood is right there for the taking), Bize incisively illustrates the oft-conflicting emotions a grieving parent might go through. It would be an almost touching moment if it weren’t for the next shot, in which Javier violently throws soy milk cartons to the floor, suggesting his connection to Pedro’s milk isn’t so trouble-free after all. “I kinda like it now,” the bereaved Dad continues, pointing to a possibility he might be looking for a connection with his dead son. “I still buy soy milk,” confesses Javier for example, suggesting that he’s not rationally capable yet of giving up old habits associated with Pedro. Like in his previous features, Bize is a master at using small details to illustrate larger problems, often using only very few words.