I binged all four episodes at once, so it seemed like a long movie, more than a series (TV people hate it when people say short series are long movies, but everyone sees the world in their own way. ), and then I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know how much he had to do with it. jet lagWell, I had just returned from an American trip, and how excited it was. I only know that it became clear to me without blurring the planes, the faces, the gestures, the silences and the background sounds of the desolate Bilbao that Alauda Ruiz de Azúa portrays in To want.
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When art is put at the service of a cause, the result does not have to be rabble-rousing, flat, priestly or a source of shame for others. Sometimes, talent and art fly far above the message, until it becomes a premise. There are morals in propaganda: the entire narrative leads to a moral conclusion that falls flat, blinding any alternative interpretation. In art, the thesis is a starting point from which the story plunges into uncomfortable, ambiguous, subtle and deep gaps, often unforeseen by its creator.
This is what happens with To wantwhich presents a case of violence without ever questioning the initial point of view or betraying the message about machismo, but without giving up the complexity of a subtle world that unfolds with the perplexing softness of an origami. The houses, the streets, the way they walk and the looks, much more than the words, which are sparse and irrelevant, turn the spectators into another member of that broken family. Ruiz de Azúa takes sides from the beginning with the victim (played by the impressive Nagore Aramburu) of a debatable and difficult to prove case, and it takes him four hours to recruit the rest of the characters and all the viewers to his cause. He does it not with arguments, but with the force of the narrative. We hug that shoulderless and brave woman who does not allow herself to be hugged because the director turns her into everyone’s mother.
This is art without adjectives. To want It is not a TV movie for lazy high school teachers to fill in a Values class. That is why we should celebrate it with enthusiasm and protect it from easy contempt, in case the TV bosses dare to follow this path and stop treating viewers like stupid children.
