‘The sparkles’
Director: Pilar Palomero
Performers: Patricia López Arnáiz, Antonio de la Torre, Marina Guerola, Julián López
Year: 2024
Esteno: October 4, 2024
★★★★
The presence of death makes life more interesting; Someone rightly states it at one point in Pilar Palomero’s third feature film, her best feature film. The idea is that it would do us good to accept our own finitude, and understand that dying is a stage of existence, because otherwise we run the risk of missing the luminous trail, or the sparkles, that our people leave us before they leave.
The film portrays a woman who is forced by her daughter to take care of her ex-husband, who is sick and will not recover. There remains resentment between them, but helping him walk his final path moves her to rethink their past together, and to see their current situation with new eyes. And, while observing this family, Palomero remains patient and calm before the arrival of the inevitable, sliding the camera to take inventory of what will be gone when the time comes but above all what remains and survives us, repositories of memories like books, drawings, photographs, sun rays.
At all times he avoids the sentimentality, the histrionics and the tremendouscertain that containment is the ideal place in which to place its characters -extraordinary Patricia López Arnáiz and Antonio de la Torre-, and from which to say everything that is needed about the need to be there, supporting us, accompanying us while we live and until we stop doing so, meanwhile absorbing the light emitted by the flashes.
