The melodramatic thriller “What Love Hides” by the outstanding Spanish director Fernando Trueba is in theaters. Mikhail Trofimenkov Once again I was sadly convinced that most directors, having surpassed a certain age level, narcissistically film out of inertia, not noticing that they have lost the muscular strength of their previous works.
It’s strange: in world cinema there are more and more full-length commercials that more or less successfully pretend to be real films. Over the past few months, an Australian thriller promoting surfing beaches and a comedy promoting hiking trails and the patriarchal delights of Northern Italy have appeared at the domestic box office. But who would have expected this from Fernando Trueba.
Trueba is the second-largest face of Spanish cinema after Pedro Almodóvar. A well-deserved Oscar winner for Belle Epoque (1992), a charming vaudeville about the four brides of Corporal Fernando, who deserted from the royal army on the eve of the Republican Revolution of 1931.
In general, Trueba’s specialty is the skillful weaving of tragic pages of the 20th century into genre constructions. The cultural complicity of Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain in The Girl of Your Dreams (1998). The grim trauma of the surviving victims of the Pinochet dictatorship in The Dancer and the Thief (2009). The drama of the Spanish Republicans who ended up in French concentration camps in “The Artist and His Model” (2012). A lonely romantic’s battle with Colombian crime in The Coming Forgetfulness (2020).
This is where the big story, albeit distantly, penetrates. The heroes see on TV the New York apocalypse of September 11, 2001, but they see only that. At first it seems like the attack on the World Trade Center has something to do with Max’s (Matt Dillon) shady past, but it doesn’t. Trueba inserted this episode into the film only to indicate the timing of the action.
“What Love Hides” can be summed up in one phrase. The mysterious and unshaven Max sits on the shores of the Aegean Sea at night and secretly plays jazz melodies on the clarinet. If Vladimir Nabokov were alive, he would not have found a better illustration of his futile attempts to explain to American students what the Russian word “vulgarity” means. This is exactly what it is.
So, a certain Alex (Aida Folch), who was counting on the position of hostess in the fashionable restaurant of that same Max, arrives on a certain Greek island with an enviable delay. The girl explains her lateness by a whole fireworks of force majeure on her way. Either her bag with documents, phone and bank cards was stolen, or, as luck would have it, a strike happened at the airport. Unshaven Max is rude at first, but then takes on the role of a waitress. Alex, without slowing down after the grueling journey, begins to harass him.
The process of seduction is illustrated by footage of luxurious life on the Aegean Islands. Magical views from the window of the apartment that Max provided to Alex. Colorful Greek wedding. Olives with retsina. Meals where every dish is “some kind of Matisse,” whatever that means.
But the advertising picture must be dramaturgically burdened. With Alex, everything is simple: her heart is broken, the guy turned out to be a married man with many children. Things are more complicated with Max.
Matt Dillon initially wears a mystery zombie mask. Already on the second day of meeting Alex, he stuns him with the phrase: “I never know what you’re thinking about.” Max is naturally confused. Then it turns out that he secretly plays the clarinet, which he denied owning. Then – horror, horror, horror – that he secretly reads Hesse and Joyce. And in general, something happened in his life that forced him to leave his jazz career and move to Greece.
The audience was never able to find out what exactly happened. Apparently, Truebe himself failed. So he simply handed out knives and cans of gasoline to the heroes so that once and for all they would put an end to each other and this vague story.
