There was a lot of expectation to see The wonder, the new work by Sebastián Lelio that competes in the official section of the San Sebastian festival, after its warm reception in Toronto. The film was liked, and very much, starting the applause of the public in the morning showing this Thursday, and it is positioned as a candidate firm for the Golden Shell in this final stretch of the contest.
Based on the novel by Emma Donoghue, with which the Chilean director collaborated on the screenplay with Alice Birch, The Wonder confronts science and faith in its narration of the strange case of a girl who hasn't eaten for four months in Ireland in 1864 , during the Great Famine. The English nurse Elizabeth Wright, hired by a committee to observe the minor for two weeks and make a report on her situation, moves to the cabin where the young woman lives with her religious family. Next to her will also be a nun, with whom she will not be able to exchange opinions about the girl, who she says that she only feeds on "God's manna".
Wright tries by all means that no one touches her and that the baby eats when he sees that she is getting paler and more fragile. However, her parents, who have already lost a son, do not force her and are willing for her other angel to go straight to heaven. "I am very excited to return to San Sebastian after coming for the first time in 2005 with La sagrada familia", assured the Oscar-winning director of A Fantastic Woman, who has signed the unstoppable Florence Pugh -she returns to period drama and corsets after Lady Macbeth and Little Women - in the role of a nurse who hides a painful past and tries to find out if what happens to Anna is a farce or a true miracle, as the townspeople believe. "Her obsession with understanding the mechanisms of this miracle or farce becomes something that catches her," explained Lelio. But what shakes her is not discovering that mechanism but the reason behind it and that it is "devastating". Therefore, she "has no choice but to descend into the girl's imaginary, go to her story and save her from there and her own beliefs."
For the filmmaker, Pugh's character has a "scientific mentality and her way of reading reality contains doubt and is willing to adapt, unlike the other characters, who are fixed in their position. That is the definition of fanaticism. film says yes to the spiritual and intellectual resilience against all fanaticism that is what we are going through today politically".
Lelio was moved by the story when he first read the novel in 2017. "It caught me. I connected with the two main characters, with the very particular relationship they establish, the fascination they feel between them, the love and the need to save their lives. at each other".
The film is in fact a tribute to the stories. Right from the first images, it shows us the decoration of a set and a voiceover invites us to believe in that story that we are going to see next, returning to it again at the end, like that bird that can be seen both inside and outside. of the cage. "We wanted to show that the film itself is part of the problem as a discourse, to expose the mechanisms of fiction", because "everything is a story and 'storytelling' is not only entertainment, it is also politics".
The enveloping soundtrack by composer Matthew Herbert acts as one more character. "We made four scores together to understand the tone we wanted," adds Lelio, who explains that The wonder "is at times a western, a character study and also flirts with overtones of horror." The 48-year-old director also took advantage of the press conference to defend the current referendum process in his country to have a new constitution. "In Chile we are in the process of building a history that is up to what we need, the previous Constitution stopped working and now we are in a process of collective narrative." The wonder will land in Spanish movie theaters on November 16 before reaching Netflix.
