In all his films, in one way or another, Jonas Trueba is “back to love”, a topic to which he returns with You will returnwhich shows the everyday life of a couple who leaves their loved ones perplexed when they announce that they will end 15 years together with a break-up party. In his eighth feature film, the Madrid-born filmmaker shows off more than ever his cinematic heritage, the one that comes from his family – he directs his father, Fernando Truebawho makes his acting debut – and classic Hollywood comedies. Jonás Trueba takes this genre to his own territory to reflect on relationships, cinema itself and how books and films tell us about ourselves. “We are fine” may be the phrase that is repeated the most Sea Plum y Vito Sanz throughout this story, which won an award at the Cannes Film Festival’s Filmmakers’ Fortnight and hits theaters this Friday, August 30.
It is based on an idea from his father, Fernando Trueba: that we should celebrate the end of relationships and not the beginning. When does it become a film?
It was an idea that I had from one of his quotes and I myself would talk about it when some friends were going to split up. I realized that it worked more like fiction, that it had something idealistic about it. I always think that the films we make have this component. It was very consistent with what we have been doing and it also contains the mechanics of the classic comedies that I have always liked. I think that it was waiting for me. Sometimes you carry the films inside you and you don’t know it.
In You will return Repetition is very present, both in the structure and in the reference to Sören Kierkegaard’s book. Do you value it?
I claim it a lot. Knowing that it is frowned upon in some way and that in cinema it seems that everything always has to move forward. Repetition is part of life in an absolute way. From the moment we get up until we go to bed, we repeat the same gestures, the same phrases… And cinema avoids it or leaves it aside. There is something that I like to claim for cinema, a whole series of things that cinema does. mainstream It is often overlooked that these are the rhythms of everyday life. Cinema seems to be afraid of life or that reality does not seem enough to it and it wants to constantly speed it up, domesticate it, manipulate it, make it spectacular, as if life were not enough.
“Mainstream cinema often ignores the rhythms of everyday life”
Love is a constant in his filmography.
It’s in practically all my films, better or worse, more or less, it comes and goes. I guess we’re always dealing with love. The romantic exiles It was a vindication of the ephemeral loves of summer, of the pure present. The Reconquista There was more weight of past love, a love that lasts beyond the relationships themselves. You will return We told it in a different way than we had done before. We had begun to embitter it in You have to come and see itand here we perhaps go deeper: this love of the couple when they have been together for a while and there is something that perhaps is perceived as worn out and routine. We show it without turning it into a cliché, claiming it. Love is often that and cinema does not show it. Why does it almost always focus on the beginning of love, the crush, or the disaster of love, the dramatic end? But almost never on what love is mostly: the development of the couple. It can be very elastic and it mutates and that is what is interesting.
What classic comedies have left their mark on you?
I showed Itsaso and Vito what are canonically understood as comedies of marital intrigue. The book The pursuit of happinessby Stanley Cavell, deals with this genre in which a couple separates and gets back together or gives each other a second chance, based on seven titles: It Happened One Night, The Puritan Scoundrel, The Three Nights of Eve, Adam’s Rib, The Philadelphia Story y New moonFor a week, we watched one every day and then sat around chatting and noting how modern they still were. How unattainable they are.
I’ve thought a lot about this genre of couples put in crisis to the point of madness. Sunriseby Murnau, although it is not a comedy, has a lot to do with this story of the couple that gets into an argument and The Atalanta We could also say that it is a remarriage comedy. If you come to contemporary cinema, a film by the Dardennes that is in another register, The boyis also a film about a couple in crisis or I will always love youby Rossellini… It is a genre that permeates cinema beyond comedy.
You will return It also draws on these other films. It starts from a comedy premise, but I don’t think it is exactly that. And another one that I have always liked a lot, since I was little, Stuck in timeworks with repetition in a very deep way and I have it completely in my DNA.
Speaking of DNA, he has always made films with friends and now he is joining his father, in his first acting role.
I also see my father as a friend many times. He never stops being my father, but I think we have a relationship of friendship and sharing that can be very similar to the one you have with a friend and it has been great to be able to incorporate him into the Los Ilusos team. Our films always work on a certain idea of a group and having my father there as one more has been very exciting because he perceived it that way. He had a good time and made the team laugh a lot. One of the happiest days of the whole process is when my father came to shoot because he left everyone dying of laughter between takes. He brought a curiously very youthful and fun spirit, which is very much his own. He is very silly, I think that probably at his school he was the class clown and, if you let him, he still is.
One of his character’s lines is: “What good is a father if not to give his children bibliography?”
That phrase is fair. It came out spontaneously during the shoot, but I think it responds to something that we carry with us, which is this thing of transmission. We are sharing books, films, songs, music, newspaper articles, conversations… all the time. My father has transmitted this to me and I have transmitted it to him for some time now. I see life like that many times, it has to do with a kind of transmission of things that we like from one to another. I have experienced that moment in the film many times: my father talking to me about something he is passionate about, something he is reading and immediately wants you to read it. There is something almost obsessive and dictatorial about it at times and I liked making humor out of it.
In the film, reading acts almost as therapy.
Books and movies can have something healing. They have saved us or we have felt that they saved us or that they gave us a clue to something at a certain moment and we have clung to them like a life preserver.
“Books and movies can have something healing”
In The Virgin of August co-wrote with Itsaso Arana and this is a script written by six people, also with Vito Sanz. How did you come up with it?
You will return It has been a way of returning to a more classic film and script writing, which is also something that runs in my family. This is my most written film since All the songs are about mein the sense of sitting down to write a script that was a little more canonical, with its structure, its more precise dialogues and many versions.
With Itsaso and Vito, I proposed that they live with me during the process, assuming the direction of the writing, but using them to consult with them on everything and put everything into crisis to get some ideas that have to do with the characters.
Es a co-production with France, where The Virgin of August it worked very well.
It is very difficult to reach the French circuit and it seems that only Spanish films that are based on co-production, such as those of Oliver Laxe, Rodrigo Sorogoyen or Albert Serra, can reach there. This is the first time I have had it. We arrived with The Virgin of August by a French distributor, we are a very rare case. Now it has finally been found You will return Because a production company has shown interest and they have let us make it as we have done before, without any kind of forcing. It is not that I want to make all the films in co-production by default. We have to try to make them natural.
“One always needs to make one’s own rituals”
The protagonists use a divinatory method inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Tarot. As a director, what do you predict for the past, present and future?
I don’t know exactly. I should take it now, because I’m in a deadlock, in a somewhat strange present between my past and my future, in a kind of confusion. We have used it even during the scriptwriting process, we have consulted him with strong doubts that we had and it has helped us a lot because it is still an exercise in creative stimulation. Of looking at an image, a word and putting them in relation to each other. It depends a lot on you.
You will return proposes a new ritual in a world where more and more traditions are disappearing. How does it relate to rituals?
As with many other things, in a contradictory way. On the one hand, I understand the gradual disappearance of some rituals, such as weddings, traditions that I admit I see from a distance, but that we have undoubtedly always needed.
At our production company, Los Ilusos, I always like to ritualize a film before starting it, and we go to the same place, which is El Pandora. It’s a tradition to bring us luck, almost something superstitious. And we return to that same place as soon as we finish to check how it went. In the end, one always needs to do one’s own rituals.
This thing about celebrating separation has been around for a long time. My father does it spontaneously, it has to do with an idea of seeing life as an escapist, of not wanting to see the sad side of things, but he discovered that in Mauritania they have always done it and that in the United States it is also done. People like to celebrate everything, maybe sometimes too much, but I think it is good to have rituals. Maybe not exactly the ones that are imposed on us.
