Oriol Paulo has faced his "most complicated and ambitious" film with Los renglones crooked de Dios, an adaptation of the homonymous bestseller by Torcuato Luca de Tena published in 1979 and one of the most emblematic works of contemporary Spanish literature. The film, which arrives in theaters this October 6, coinciding with Spanish Cinema Day, is one of the titles that has generated the most expectation since it became known that the director of Contratiempo was behind a project that took him six months to accept.
"I knew the novel, I knew what it meant to adapt it and I felt dizzy, but at the same time I couldn't stop thinking about the memory I had of the book and especially Alice Gould's character, -who plays a Bárbara Lennie with blonde hair-. From here I called the screenwriter and playwright Guillem Clua, with whom I have collaborated before, and we got to work, aware of the challenge of adapting a novel written more than 40 years ago, in a very different Spain and with a very different audience", Paulo explains in conversation with La Vanguardia.
For the director, the challenge was "to make a film that felt current but respected the spirit of the original book and that the people who own the rights, since it is a work that has been tried to be adapted many times for the big screen, would be calm with the adaptation that we were going to carry out". The first time The crooked lines of God fell into his hands, he was 14 years old. "My grandmother was a great reader of mystery novels and at that age I had already devoured the works of Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle. Luca de Tena's novel has that point of mystery, it makes you navigate through labyrinths and I especially remember the character of Alice, who fascinated me and I wanted to cling to that memory of an extremely intelligent upper-class woman, with a very great dialectical capacity and with a duality, which in the end is the challenge that is posed to the viewer".
The film follows Alice Gould, a private investigator who enters a psychiatric hospital feigning paranoia in order to gather information about the strange death of a patient. However, once in the sanatorium, things will not turn out as expected by this woman who in the middle of 1979 "is capable of putting an entire psychiatric institution in check" and specifically the director Samuel Alvar, a character played by Eduard Fernández.
Alice is a very advanced woman for that time in which "with only her husband's signature they could lock her up in a psychiatric hospital" and Paulo wanted to reinforce that empowerment "not only with the character of Lennie but with that of Dr. Montserrat Castell who Loreto Mauleón exercises, who somehow represents the new psychiatry that is pushing the old and has a different vision of the world of mental health".
The film explains that "within those four walls a change is taking place in the same way that the country was transforming", although the director insists on placing the camera more inside than outside to show the humiliating treatment received by patients. "We wanted to be very precise with the time, documenting ourselves a lot and surrounding ourselves with psychiatrists," explains the Catalan director, who always had Lennie in mind for the role, "a stratospheric actress" with whom he had already worked in the blockbuster Contratiempo (2016 ).
"I called her during confinement, it is still curious that we were writing about a woman who confines herself, I let her read the material and she read the novel, which she did not know, and she accepted." With Bárbara on board, she needed someone who could be her opponent because "the film is about two big egos colliding; two people with supernatural intelligence who use words to confront each other, and Eduard Fernández was the natural choice."
Another mythical character in the novel is Ignacio Urquieta (Pablo Derqui), Gould's ally and the only inmate who recognizes that he is crazy. "I think he's inspired by someone Torcuato met when he was in a sanatorium for 18 days before writing the novel, and at the end of the film it talks about how many times the line between sanity and madness can be very fine."
Shot over ten weeks in an old tobacco factory in Tarragona, the feature film relies on a team of "carefully selected" extras and plays with invisible digital effects, such as the one that allows a single actor to play the twin brothers Rómulo and Remo, with whom the protagonist has a maternal relationship.
The journey that Paulo wanted the viewer to take with Alice was an arduous process to pull off. The inner voice of the novel could not be transferred to the screen, so the structure of the script was adapted in such a way that the public could empathize with the protagonist and "the fans of the possible dualities that exist in the film and that not only affect Lennie's character but also Fernandez's."
Regarding the references that fly over the film, Paulo cites four films that he shared with the actors: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Milos Forman; Shutter Island, by Martin Scorsese; Corridor of No Return, by Samuel Fuller and Unsane, by Steven Soderbergh. "We have not been inspired by any of them in particular, but we wanted to see them, so that the film had a seventies flavor, just as we have also looked at Chabrol's cinema to build the whole part outside the sanatorium that explains the life of Alice", points out the director, who hopes that the viewer will enjoy a film "especially made to be seen on the big screen" and that it is "a roller coaster of sensations, emotions and tensions that catch you from minute one".
Lennie faces one of his most complex roles, "not only because Alice's head is complex, but because the narrative structure is complex and the film plays with confusion, so you had to do some preliminary work to clean up and go to the root of what is being told. The main thing for me was to understand who this woman was and what was happening to her, "says the interpreter from Madrid, eight months pregnant.
Reading the novel was not at all easy to digest. "At first I didn't understand anything. On paper the script was a very big mess, I even felt embarrassed to tell Oriol that he wasn't understanding what was true and what wasn't, the flashbacks... I was stunned. At the same time it was also a challenge fun because she is a woman very far from what I am and it was an opportunity to be able to even transform my physique, which is something that I have not done much in my career either". Lennie sees Gould as "a hero and an anti-hero at the same time" and found it "great to be able to develop that bit of dialectical ability that she can dupe so many people with and manipulate them." "And if the fact of being an intelligent, attractive woman with money generates many misgivings today, imagine yourself in 79 in a country like Spain," she adds.
"She enters that place with a very clear objective and decides to take out all her tools to achieve it, what happens is that along the way... ". For the actress, the look of that woman, which can be as sweet as it is seductive or violent, is key. "She is obsessively observant, she likes beauty and looks at the world in a very fluffy way, also because a lot of things always happen in her head and the film plays a little on that; as reality progresses around her she develops new discourses, with Which there was something about the look of how the world enters her that was very important."
Lennie, who this year is also present in El agua y la argentina El suplente, affirms that playing this role has meant a huge change since he began to tackle it until the shooting ended. "At first he seemed like someone very inaccessible to me. It had been a long time since that happened to me because I'm very intuitive and in the first reading of something I'm going to do I have clairvoyance and here it didn't happen to me. There has been a big change from the insecurities I had to the beginning until I finished, because Alice was already very much in my skin. I lived with her very intensely for ten weeks and I couldn't wait to get rid of her", he says with a wide smile.
The actress confesses that she will take some time off to be with her baby "but not so much because they have waited for me and changed filming dates and I have various commitments of things that I really want."
