Kindly commissioned by The Dissidents during their 2024 Cannes Film Festival coverage.
by TWY
Volveréis begins as an experiment: her two actors in bed, bathed in a bluish, theatrical moonlight, and there we are given a proposal, a theory. A man, Alex (Vito Sanz), asks his partner of fourteen years, Alejandra (Itsaso Arana), to host a party to celebrate their future separation. The audience doesn’t know these characters yet, and we will never know the exact reason for them to doubt their marriage, except that they will part in good faith. The scene is set in motion only by the expression of an idea. This idea, inspired by a theory of Ale’s father, believes that a couple should not celebrate their union but rather “the other way around.” Then, said Alejandra, a film director herself: “I’ve always thought that it could be a good idea for a film… But in real life, I don’t know.” Here, a second theory surfaces, a fission reaction to the heroine’s concern: can real life exist in a film?
But then, in the second shot, with apparent discontinuity from the first, Alejandra dreams in her sleep. Wordless, her husband gives her shoulder a tender touch. Did she just dream about this conversation? Is this proposal of a party something of a fantastic narrative invented in a separate world, a fiction? This premise announced out of thin air, immediately renders everything that follows as performances, a long rehearsal that becomes the film’s substance.
Theories persist throughout the film as they fork paths between cinema and reality. Such is the project of Jonás Trueba, a free thinker whose films flow between documentary and fiction, of cinema as a lived performance between friends, loved ones, and strangers. After the revelatory La Virgen de Agosto (2019), a Rohmerian diary film where Itsaso Arana, the filmmaker’s real-life partner, encounters conversations, myths, and love while strolling the city of Madrid, his five-hour epic Quién lo impide (2021) further solidifies the filmmaker’s hybrid vision, where Trueba followed a group of high school students through their adolescence. This communal work invites its youthful participants to stage their personal fiction where visions of life can remain in a cinematographic utopia, combining rehearsed dramatic sequences with real-life footage of their growth in life. And Trueba is not alone in carrying this pedagogy, for it is also visible in Arana’s directorial debut, Las chicas están bien (2023), where a group of actresses rehearse an all-female play in a country resort while reflecting own their personal lives. In these films, these experiments of life, this idea of collective performance links together rituals and traditions that mark the Trueba-Arana extended family, many of which have returned in this new work of brilliant self-reflectivity.
After their first nocturnal exchange, although the couple’s morning rituals – the opening of windows, the making of a coffee, etc. – seem unchanged, it would already look dramatized, seen through some rhythmic intercutting: traces of naturalism or improvisations are prohibited, for they are living in a film, looking for the “real life” that is only a matter of mise-en-scene. The question posed by Alejandra predates the eventual reveal that the film’s narrative is also part of a “meta-film,” directed by Alejandra and starring herself and her partner, of which we see the editing done in real-time. We now meet a third theory, unique in this worn-out realm of “meta cinema” or “filmmaker’s film”: there must be no distinctions between the “film-within-the-film” and the lives of the onscreen filmmakers. Alejandra’s film is not left on the editing table but fully merged with the film’s reality, only explainable through the montage, where images “bleed out” onto the other. In short, we must consider cinema and life as equal, and to not make these distinctions is to let the ordinary rise with the cinema, and vice versa. Any “films-within-the-film” is not a closed theater where an actor exits into pure fantasies; meanwhile, the “real life” must also not retract to naturalism, taken for granted by many festival films, where one puts down their imaginaries in favor of the non-law of society. Everything that happens in cinema happens.
Thus, Volveréis also begins as an invitation. The couple meets friends, relatives, and strangers to announce their project, and Trueba films these encounters frontally, with minimal camera angles as in rehearsals (or in “repetitions”). To have a theory or an idea is to share it with others, to test out that theory in the open, and to invite not only friends but also their own theories about life. If, in a film, the idea of a party is always immediately desirable, wedding or non-wedding, it is because collectivity remains such a gesture that invites the joy of staging action and rituals, not to mention its parallel to filmmaking itself. But real life exists. Thus, this very cinematic idea of a party, so natural for the camera, must also be considered from the opposite angle. It is no secret that Trueba takes inspiration from the screwball comedies of classic Hollywood, as well as the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, who coined the term “comedy of remarriage” in his book Pursuits of Happiness, already present in La Virgen de Agosto, and this time invoked by the heroine’s father, played by the great Fernando Trueba, the filmmaker’s own. But to cite Cavell, “Can cinema make us better?” In the film, the repeating introduction of a cinematic act reveals everything outside of said act, in a casual conversation, a drawing class, or a film shoot.
From The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1939) to The Lady Eve (1941), what is a screwball comedy, if not a disruptive but loving gesture, to pull oneself out of the ordinary and not take the world for granted? However, the prospect of making a screwball comedy is also not admitted automatically: these films play no stylistic games, either special effects or psychological tricks. Howard Hawks and Leo McCarey film their actors frontally, with their whole physicality. If a band plays music, the camera must attend to every player and every instrument. This frontal clarity is the only law. In fact, even with its meta-film structure or references to great filmmakers, Volveréis is never a “cinephilia” film as it appears to be. A filmmaker can never really pay “homages” to a Hawks or a McCarey; they must evoke their spirit through their own movements, comedic or not, and with their own laws.
A paradox now presents itself. Despite its apparent fascination with the final ritual, marking the end of a relationship, Trueba persists at a somewhat somber speed. With none of that crazy anticipation towards completion, a much quieter disruption takes place, this stubborn repetition that suspends time: this “September 22nd” sounds less like an invitation but more like a deadline. Let’s even say that he abandons his conclusion and dissolves it by prolonging its preparation. (Side-note 1. There is another film in this year’s selection where the filmmakers face a hard deadline: Scénarios by Jean-Luc Godard. To finish the film one day before the filmmaker’s assisted suicide on September 13th, 2022, Godard’s trusted right-hand men, Fabrice Aragno and Jean-Paul Battaglia, rushed to find a rare quote by Sartre for him to read in the final shot, becoming Godard’s last self-portrait.)
To cite Cavell with a curious passage on The Awful Truth: “That there is not a dull scene in the film is less important a fact, or less surprising given its company, than that there is no knock-out scene, nothing you might call a winning scene…” (Side-note 2. That’s why Cary Grant remains the ultimate screwball comedian – psychology means nothing to him.) If, for Cavell, this nonchalant attitude marks the height of the film’s philosophy, the fact that Volveréis enjoys too much the build-up to the party rather than the party itself is not that surprising either. The same goes for the fact that a couple stages a celebration but hides the “awful truth” behind it, for they believe in a principle of art, of a cinema that sees a life to continue.
LA FRÉDÉRIQUE - journal of cinema. 
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