In 1988, Isabel Coixet (Barcelona, 1960) presented her first opera, Demasiado viejo para morir joven, in the New Directors section of the Sant Sebastià festival. In the last edition of the Donostia competition, she participated for the first time in the Official Section with the special out-of-competition screening of the documentary El sostre groc and now the Catalan filmmaker is back again, already looking towards the Concha d'Or, with Un amor , adaptation of Sara Mesa's acclaimed novel of the same name published in 2020, which will hit theaters on November 10.
Starring Laia Costa and Hovik Keuchkerian, Coixet explores in the film the internal contradictions of Nat, a young woman who escapes from a painful past as a translator in a mediation office for refugees and seeks refuge in a town in La Escapa where try to start from scratch. With next to no money, she rents a ramshackle home from a sleazy landlord who despises her and gives her an abused dog to keep her company. In this village, the arrival of the woman arouses excessive interest among the neighbors, especially one, whom they call the German and from whom she accepts a disturbing sexual proposal.
What caught you from reading Un amor to want to transfer it to the big screen?
Sara Mesa seems to me to be one of the most interesting voices in contemporary Spanish literature. I think she has a very own style, a rough and uncomplimentary tone that I really like and I basically identified with the protagonist of the book. I fell in love with the novel and wanted to make a movie out of it.
He has changed some things in the book...
I think the essence is there in the film. The only fundamental thing I wanted to add is where she comes from, which was not so clear in the book.
Does he see Nat as a mysterious woman?
No way. I understand it very much. I have been this woman at different times in my life. There are people who live wonderful, happy and very rational lives. But life is not like that. Most people are chaotic, a roller coaster, with times when you are good and others bad. And there are times when you obsess over people who won't bring you anything good, you see that and you still keep going.
The film demystifies the countryside as an idyllic place to start a new life
It's a romantic idea that...wherever you go, whatever problems or advantages you have, you take them with you. I don't have a romantic idea of life in the villages. I think the same dynamics are repeated as in a city. But in a village, everything is just fine.
What tension the characters of Hugo Silva, Luis Bermejo and Francesco Carril create!
It's that microaggression thing... The map of world horror I think I've got pretty clear, but there's also something that is the ongoing microaggression of someone who means well to help you, but is actually telling you : 'You don't do well, you don't live well'. Those kinds of questions that all women have had to answer in our lives. They are everyday microaggressions that undermine us. I know a lot of men are feeling very confused right now, but we women are confused too. What's more, our confusion is twofold because to the confusion of the world in general is added that of a series of attributes that a society values us through, which is seduction, this thing of wanting to please, but not wanting to like. We don't do anything to please, but we actually want to. It's very contradictory and there's a lot of that in the film.
Nat allows herself to be helped in exchange for sex.
It is a transaction that is the key to the book and the film. How do we judge this transaction? There are many people who do not understand it. In fact, Sara Mesa jokes that Nat is the most hated character in contemporary Spanish literature and I know there are people who hate this character. I do not.
Do you think the public can empathize with what you do?
I hope so because, if not, they have a problem (laughter). It's funny to me when there are people who don't understand that Nat goes to bed with such a fat man. That they have only carded with Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves or couples who are good? It's just that I already laugh at the word regulation.
And from the transaction we move to a connection that turns into obsession.
Does it come from masochism, that she wants to punish herself, from a sexual attachment, from a projection? Well, it can come from many things. It's funny to me that women's desire is now being talked about as if desire were a monolithic thing, without edges... it's a very complex thing. There is a mental component that has to do with your nature, your past.
