Confirmed city-dwellers Elena and Daniel take a train to the Madrid countryside to visit their old friends Susana and Guillermo one sunny day in You Have to Come and See It (Tenéis que venir a verla), Jonas Trueba’s concise one-hour mood piece in which bookish ideas and melancholy memories erupt into polite conversation. Filmed with the director’s stock players, including Itsaso Arana and Vito Sanz from The August Virgin (2019), it invites the viewer on a day in the country in familiar company, where the simple bucolic pleasures of wandering through nature recall Renoir and where the social interactions and undercurrents tip a hat at Rohmer. There’s even a whiff of Goethe’s Elective Affinities thrown in, though sans sex which is absent here. It made a light-hearted festival bow in Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe competition and, though the length suggests small screen, it could find art house fans just about anywhere.
Cutting to the chase, Trueba stages the film in just three locations. The first is at a piano recital held in an intimate caffè concerto setting, where we see four attendees sipping wine as they listen to a pianist perform his own work. Since Trueba shoots only one face at a time in a long-held shot, the initial information is individual and physiognomic. Elena (played by the glowing Arana with an intellectual’s wire-rimmed glasses, just so it’s clear) listens the most intensely, letting herself be wrapped up in the music; Susana (Irene Escolar from the Spanish comedy Official Competition) can’t stop smiling and shooting mischievous looks to someone sitting offscreen. Later, she and her partner Guillermo (Francesco Carril) tell Elena and her partner Daniel (Vito Sanz) their happy news about expecting a baby, and press them to pay them a visit in their marvelous new home in the country.
Before this happens, however, Elena introduces some philosophical themes from a book she’s reading in bed. This book, You Must Change Your Life by German cultural theorist and TV guru Peter Sloterdijk, has totally captured her feverish imagination, to the point where she feels compelled to read entire passages to others, and in a film this short, that’s a very significant slice of screen time. Whether Trueba also embraces Sloterdijk’s posthumanist philosophy and his vision of the past and future of the planet cannot really be determined. But it does make for some scintillating discussions on a level rarely scene in movies, and should be especially effective with college-age audiences and up.
The second half humorously describes Elena and Dani’s obligatory journey to see their friends. On the train (they take the wrong one) we hear Bill Callahan singing a delightfully appropriate song, “Let’s Move to the Country”. It sounds so easy to change one’s life. When they arrive, the house is spacious and the countryside pristine, but something is off. Trueba captures this transience (of mood, more than reality) in a few offhand remarks: Susana has had a miscarriage and lost her baby, Guillermo confesses they haven’t been able to make any friends, and they’re no longer sure the move was the right thing to do.
The final scene, in which the protags take a walk through tall grass into the woods, in a certain oblique way might illustrate Sloterdijk’s conviction that art has lost its strength and now only nature speaks to us. He meant through natural catastrophes and pandemics, but maybe a sun-dappled grove shot in all its natural glory by D.P. Santiago Racaj also has a few kind words to whisper. It is harder to understand the need to end this delicate film with a heavy-handed Nouvelle Vague wink that adds very little.
Of note is the film’s setting sometime during the Covid-19 period, though it makes little sense that the no one wears a mask indoors at the caffé concerto while Elena and Dani put their masks on walking home late at night through Madrid’s deserted streets. Perhaps this is meant as an ironic observation of human inconsistency. But the pandemic can certainly be invoked as a contributing factor to Susana and Guillermo’s sense of isolation and the quartet’s need to meet again.
Director, screenplay: Jonas Trueba
Cast: Itsaso Arana, Vito Sanz, Francesco Carril, Irene Escolar
Producer: Javier Lafuente, Jonas Trueba
Cinematography: Santiago Racaj
Editing: Marta Velasco
Production design: Miguel Angel Rebollo
Costume design: Laura Renau
Sound: Alvaro Silva, Eduardo Castro
Production company: Los Ilusos Films
World Sales: Bendita Film Sales
Venue: KVIFF Film Festival (Crystal Globe competition)
In Spanish
64 minutes
