Second chances can come when we least expect it. Change is usually a setback but although it may not seem like it, it is always punctual. For some it arrives late, for others time is relative and for Pilar, the protagonist of A common place, it is a revelation. The film is the solo debut of Celia Giraldo, until now director of music videos for the Catalan singer Rigoberta Bandini (Perra, Así bailaba) and some episodes of the series This is not Sweden, arrives just in time to answer several questions about freedom, reconnection and mutual care.
A common place tells the story of a woman, played by Eva Llorach, who lives immersed in a routine that has never been questioned: work, family and household chores. Until the day she is suddenly fired and enters a deep identity crisis. Produced by the Higher School of Cinema and Audiovisuals of Catalonia (Escac), where the director trained, the film was presented at D'A, the Barcelona auteur film festival. On the verge of going to Cannes to continue filming, Giraldo met with La Vanguardia at the Pulitzer Hotel in Barcelona to discuss her debut.
The song It's cold now runs through the film with a question: What is life if there is no love?
The question orbits throughout the film and is one of the reasons why I started thinking about this film. Above all, because I saw that in the domestic sphere, in the sphere of the people we are closest to, relationships are not usually so deep either. It is very common to share a house with someone, with your family or friends, and not ask questions, take certain things for granted with your parents, your children, your siblings, it is something that I do and that we all do, right?
And that's why the song choice?
The song was very close to what the protagonist felt. And deep down I think that somehow, even if they are not very aware, the rest of the characters also feel. They do not have a real space to be vulnerable and it is not so easy to find a space in which to be vulnerable and show yourself with all your flaws and miseries.
Paradoxically speaking of family, why are there not these spaces in which to connect or care deeply?
I feel that there is something in the conception of family and routine that makes us forget that we live with other people with feelings that require emotional care. We assume too much.
Do screens have something to do with it?
Yes, screens are 100% part of our lives, within the home itself. In the film there is a moment in which, to talk to her family, the protagonist sends a WhatsApp that reaches all the rooms at the same time. The screens show a disconnection that feeds on itself and that I don't know if it existed before. The protagonist herself is part of this disconnection. And in reality everyone needs the other to listen to them, her daughter also needs her to listen to him, but there are constant interferences in this connection.
Is nature an important factor in reconnection?
Yes, although it sounds cliché. I wanted to play with the common place of all families, take them out of their comfort zone, which turns out to not be comfortable at all due to that emotional disconnection we talked about. Taking them out of their natural habitat to take them to a farmhouse where they went as children but which now turns out to have been transformed into something grotesque where they do not feel comfortable either.
Do you believe in second chances?
Yes, man, the seconds and the thirds and the fourths too. I think that my generation understands life in the short term, the reform can be much more constant. My parents' generation generally understand it as starting when you are 20 years old in a company and staying until the day you retire. That makes transforming your life a much stronger breakup. A second chance for my parents is the eighth for me.
And what role does judgment play in all this?
In my film they all judge each other and tell each other how they should live. And that happens because it seems natural to me. I judge, even if I don't have to, and that's because there is some protection in the life choice you make. It is a defense mechanism for my choices because when I question it my castle falls a little, which is what happens to the protagonist. Empathizing with other ways of life can jeopardize the vital decisions made. That's why I was interested in the youngest character, the little girl, who has not yet gone through that beginning of the trial and is only moved by curiosity and innocence.
She is the first to ask: who takes care of you?
Exact. And that question guides the rest of the film until the protagonist goes from the rigid and established to connecting with a much more playful part. You have to embrace the cringe.
Does that have much to do with the climax of the film?
Yes, suddenly, seeking to be what you are not, daring to be, is like trying to become a person connected to your inner child and experience what other people experience. And it also has to do with allowing yourself to want other things because maybe I have other beliefs and I haven't even allowed myself to explore them. And in fact, from that place is when the protagonist begins to think and verbalize the change. It's hard to stay, but it's also hard to leave. It is facing the courage to leave and also to resign.
And as the protagonist questions, who takes care of our mothers?
Pilar's character raises that question with her relationship with her daughter, which at the same time gives her something to think about her relationship with her mother, and her mother with hers, etc. There is something about “how I am feeling, have the women who came before me been feeling, and I have not focused on that?” We have to realize that we all take it for granted and it is something transgenerational. Very intrinsic in the culture.
