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SEMINCI 2022

Review: Staring at Strangers

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- Paco León goes into the closet in this film that tries, and at times succeeds, to transfer to the screen the amazingly mind-blowing universe of the writer Juan José Millás

Review: Staring at Strangers
Paco León in Staring at Strangers

If there is an artist who has made an apology for vital freedom in Spain, it is Paco León: remember his impressions of female presenters on television or Kiki, Love to Love [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Paco León
film profile
]
and Rainbow [+see also:
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trailer
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]
. That's why, at this point in time, it's shocking that he should go into a closet. But in Staring at Strangers [+see also:
trailer
interview: Félix Viscarret
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]
, the film by Félix Viscarret that opened the 67th Seminci – Valladolid International Film Festival, he not only goes into a closet, but stays in it for quite some time.

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This was also the story of the novel Desde la sombra, by Juan José Millás, which the filmmaker from Navarre - together with co-screenwriter David Muñoz - has brought to the screen, trying to preserve the strangeness, humour and surrealism taken to the max that are the signature style of a writer who will soon see his words turned into images once more, as Antonio Méndez Esparza has adapted Que nadie duerma [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Antonio Méndez Esparza
film profile
]
, soon to be released.

Has this been achieved? At times. The premise couldn't be more appealing: a withdrawn and lonely guy (played by a restrained and introverted Paco León, work that smells strongly of awards), hides in a wardrobe in the bedroom of a married couple (Leonor Watling and Àlex Brendemühl), parents of a teenage girl (María Romanillos). From his hiding place, the intruder will spy on the seemingly perfect family.

We will say no more about a plot that is a continuous box of surprises, a plot with thrill and intrigue that moves across almost all genres (even the musical, in shower mode) and where reality meets fiction, imagination meets desire and mourning meets the shortcomings of others. Anyone who has read Millás, both his books and his newspaper columns, knows that he provides real magic by placing the reader in a parallel universe, amusing and disturbing, in order to unravel human nature and its contradictions.

Viscarret tries to do the same. What happens is that literary and cinematographic language, as we all know, do not travel along the same narrative highways, and what the reader completes with their own imagination as they read the pages of a book, the viewer is offered elaborate, clear images from the screen, with conflicting credibility. The meta-fictional labyrinths of Millás lose their footing in this. On the other hand, brilliant cinematography that risks diving - like Charlie Kaufman - into the twists and turns of the neurotic mind, that is capable of constructing ideas according to the needs, complexes and shortcomings of the being that shelters it, whether it is still in the closet or has already come out of it.

Staring at Strangers is a production from the Spanish company Tornasol Films and the Belgian company Entre Chien et Loup. Its sales are managed by Latido Films and the distribution in Spain by Universal Pictures International Spain, which will be released in cinemas 4 November.

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(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)

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