The scene is tense, tender, electric. The girl is in the sea, the waves cover and reveal her nose, her mouth, her neck. She's watching, she's staring over the surf. This rocks a wooden platform, where half a dozen kids more or less his age hold on, fight, and try to jump into the water. They are neither very muscular nor are they not very muscular, they are ordinary guys. The sound of her pushing flies over the scene. The camera looks for her several times, her gaze penetrating her, she observes skins that overflow with testosterone, she observes the gladiators in swimsuits. Without the need for words she understands everything. Mila is discovering sexual desire. She just discovered men. Mila likes men. She will like men.
In reality we already know this because the film began with an adult Mila, who has just moved with her partner to what was her summer home, on that beach, in the Empordà. She lives with Marcel, whom she desires in a non-linear, non-masculine way: at the beginning of the film, they are both about to sleep when she looks for him. They hug, kiss, undress. Soon she renounces herself. He does mutate. She draws back, hesitates, her desire somewhat pierced. Stop. Marcel doesn't understand anything.
The adult Mila is Elena Martín, actress and director of this masterpiece that is Creatura, the film that won six awards the night before last at the Gaudí Awards, it is simply a masterpiece. This is being told by someone who could have been one of those bonobos fighting on the platform.
Martín, who is also exquisite as an actress, explains with Spartan economy how the girl Mila begins to discover herself or even more so to manifest herself as a heterosexual woman at only five or six years old. There is no morbidity or deception: the little girl simply prefers to play with her father than with her mother, touch him, frolic with him, and she has very little understanding of the heterosexual embryo that reigns in her. The film wraps this taboo in silk.
By contrast, it also portrays the other side. At one point, the adult Mila tries to find out if her father considers himself affectionate. This one – a phenomenal Álex Brendemühl – well, he doesn't know. It's something she had never thought about.
A masterpiece, actually a coin with heads and tails, full of implications. Those that go to the jaw.
