The Permanent Picture

La imatge permanent

Sarajevo International Film Festival, Permanent Picture
Sarajevo Film Festival

VERDICT: An elegant, playful exploration of the consolatory but deceptive nature of image-making across generations, from Catalan director-to-watch Laura Ferres.

The Permanent Picture, the debut feature of Catalan director Laura Ferres, is a film about loss and the consolatory but deceptive nature of image-making, which can ultimately never reduce life’s mysteries, as much as it is enlisted to ward off death. It explores the way in which reproducing and treasuring a person’s likeness beyond their departure is a way to stem grief, creating a seductive illusion that connects people through space and time — as long as they can believe in what they are seeing. Screening at the Sarajevo Film Festival, after premiering at Locarno, the film is an enchanting and playful post-modern curio of elegant compositions and offbeat asides. Its bare-bones story feels more or less incidental; a mechanism to hold together its idiosyncratic and enigmatically couched musings on photographic reproduction and, by extension, cinema. Ferres channels, or rather nimbly interrogates, her own experience as an advertising industry casting director, framing non-professional faces head-on in casting sessions for us to decipher what we can from them. The film, which taps into our time of heightened anxiety around AI and the questionable authenticity of what our eyes can read from a surface, signals her as a rising talent, with broader festival play sure to follow.

The Permanent Picture spans two periods of time, with fifty years between. The post-war rural south of Spain is a funereal world thick with shadows in which death hangs close, crucifixes hang over beds, and the Catholic Church dictates rigid self-control in female behaviour. From there, we shift northward, into the modern, urban realm of an advertising agency, where billboards are the new effigies, and the search is on for the perfect face to convince electoral voters.

A teenage mother leaves from her small town in the dead of night. The circumstances are hazy, but her urge to flee is not hard to fathom, as this is a sombre, fear-driven place of whispered riddles and stern judgments, where strict conformity governs rules for demure comportment. Mortality haunts daily life, and there is little line drawn between the worlds of the living and the dead. Rumoured apparitions of the Virgin spook locals, illness is left in the hands of God, and the young are forbidden to laugh in portrait sittings in case the spontaneous eruption of a smile should ruin their looks. The disappearing mother leaves her baby behind, in a traumatic separation that comes back into focus years later. 

In contemporary times, Carmen (Maria Luengo) has resettled in the northern part of the country, where she works as an advertising agency casting director. She takes a scouting trip to the countryside, searching for that elusive find of a face that has a “normal” realness to it, but is not so authentic that dreams and desires cannot be projected onto it. She chances upon Antonia (Antonia Ortega), who is getting by as a street vendor of perfume. Past and present collapse onto one another, as memory, displacement and grief haunt the new bond that forms between them.

The cryptic, stylised nature of this latticework of symbolic incident and encounter deflects any deep emotional identification with the protagonists, in a film that keeps reminding us of its own — and all cinema’s — intrinsic, depthless artificiality. We are prompted, instead, to question and doubt that images can capture even a sliver of momentary truth, and ponder what comfort or communion can be gained from a technological process that traffics in ghostly illusion. Strange visual phenomena and a history of spectral keepsakes are referenced to add evocative layers to the notion of looking as a cord to ease the pain of fatal separation: the double-exposed spirit photographs that enabled relatives to be pictured with those who had died or disappeared in the war, as if they were all still present together; and the “phantom limb” trick the brain plays after an amputation when seeing a mirror reflection and registering the lost hand still to be there. A rich soundscape of off-screen sounds (the sea, a baby crying, clicking fingers) deftly retains the presence of what is not seen in our orbit, in a world in which even sun on one’s face offers no empirical certainty there will not be rain moments later.

Director, Writer: Laura Ferres
Producer: Adrià Monés Murlans
Editor: Aina Calleja
Cinematography: Agnès Piqué Corbera
Cast: María Luengo, Rosario Ortega, Saraida Llamas, Claudia Fimia, Mila Collado, Dolores Martínez
Music: Fernando Moresi Haberman, Sergio Bertran
Sound: Dani Fontrodona
Sound Design: Alejandro Castillo
Music: Fernando Moresi Haberman, Sergio Bertran
Art Direction: Marta Collell
Production companies: Fasten Films (Spain), Le Bureau (France)
Sales: Be For Films (Belgium)
Venue: Sarajevo International Film Festival (Kinoscope)
In Catalan, Spanish
94 minutes