Irene just got divorced. Her new apartment is already set up and it seems that she is recovering her life until it is time to separate for the first time from her four-year-old daughter, who will spend the weekend with her father for the first time. she. It is a daily situation to which Irene knows that she will have to get used to it. But she suffers and she can't help it. To alleviate her pain, the young woman travels to the mountain town where she used to spend the summer and there she recovers old friends and deepens her relationship with new friends.
Elena Trapé directs Els encantats with Laia Costa, highly acclaimed by critics, as the lead. The film was released yesterday in Spanish theaters. "The starting point of the film was a personal experience. I lived motherhood in a way that I had not imagined, because I realized that I suffered if I lost my son's things and there is no story for that," explains the director in an interview granted to La Vanguardia on its way through the recent Malaga Festival.
The young filmmaker also wanted to delve into "the consequences of breakups, which go beyond the loss of a partner with the absences or the spaces that you have to conquer again." And she placed her character in a town in the Vall Fosca that she "knew because a friend's parents have a house there and we had gone on a retreat". "It was the perfect place because it has a lot to do with the reconstruction and reflects the state of mind of the protagonist, that she feels out of place."
Irene also embarks on "a trip down memory lane" in which she counts as companions the encantats, "beings that inhabit the crevices of the rocks and come out at night to hang clothes and that is exactly what happens to Irene, which is wounded with the rupture and its cracks are the nest and the vagina". Wounded because "when the separation of a child is not voluntary, when it is imposed by divorce, an unnatural situation occurs that causes pain, a pain whose existence no one had told her anything about," reflects the director.
Irene suffers from the separation from her son, but she cannot avoid avoiding her mother, who does sense the bad thing she is going through and worries about her: "Irene's mother gets on her nerves, it is a transaction, that although it is in the off of the narration, it is beautiful, above all, because Irene always ends up doing what her mother tells her", adds the director, who in 2018 won the Biznaga de Oro in Malaga with Las Distancias.
Now she and Costa have garnered good reviews with Els encantats, although the actress came to the project a bit by chance, because Trapé wanted the film's protagonist to be a mother in real life. "I didn't know that Laia had had a son, but Isabel Coixet told me and I called her right away." The rest of the cast is also a success with "actors like Ainara Elejalde, Aina Clotet or Pep Cruz in secondary roles, but not minor ones because they give more layers to the process that Irene is going through," concludes Trapé.
