‘The loved one’: undeniable expressive talent, little emotion

Unprepared viewers of El ser querido might suspect after a while of screening that the plot of this film is similar to that of the successful Norwegian (dispensable for me) Sentimental Value. To wit. Both focus on renowned film directors who hire their daughters, with whom they have had no relationship for too long, to star in their next, and perhaps definitive, film. It is not a sin, although a bit embarrassing for the one who arrived later, that different screenwriters came up with the same plot. But viewers will also note that each is unique, that the same theme can be approached with different development and variations, although I imagine the shock of screenwriters Isabel Peña and Rodrigo Sorogoyen and the producers of El ser querido upon learning of the Nordic initiative, who also won the Oscar for Best International Film and I don’t know how many more awards.

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There are several things very valuable to me in El ser querido. One is Sorogoyen’s ability to keep me absorbed throughout the entire runtime. He is a director who always experiments, who invents a different language to tell each of his stories. He does it with personality, intelligence, using new languages and permanent visual power depending on what he narrates. That exists in all his cinema and his series. Call it experimentation, boredom with fixed formulas, the need to find paths not yet traveled. It happens with everything bearing his signature. And in my case, there are never half measures regarding what his works provoke in me. There are his films that I like a lot, such as El reino and As bestas, and others that get on my nerves. The same happens with his series. I find Antidisturbios as complex as extraordinary, but I can’t stand Los años nuevos.

I think about 15 minutes pass in the initial meeting at a restaurant between a father and a daughter who have not spoken for 13 years, knowing nothing about each other. That tense and awkward encounter is resolved in shot and reverse shot of both. And you sense there are secrets between them, debts unpaid, memories with the taste of bitterness, enigmas, feelings hard to talk about, timid advances and drastic setbacks. You suspect that this personal and professional relationship between that established director in the United States, where he has also built a new family, and that daughter with a suffering soul and memories probably dripping with bitterness and a sense of abandonment, to whom the father offers to play the lead in a fiction set in the Sahara, will be very complicated.

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Trailer of ‘El ser querido’

The shooting is stormy. They give you clues about the volcanic character of the winner; that in his past there are rough things, that in the name of the perfection of his film he can be wild in his professional behavior; that, although he has achieved emotional stability with his new family, there is also a memory that he caused lasting wounds in those he abandoned. He is a professional winner, but a man with shadowy areas.

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And I stay attentive the whole time. Among other reasons, because of that majestic actor named Javier Bardem. It is pure magnetism. Impossible to ignore his presence, his gestures, what he expresses and what he hides or disguises. He is a great performer. With Victoria Luengo, who dazzled me in Antidisturbios, I have the feeling that she is always offered roles of an introverted, intense, and rough sufferer. She does it very well, although I would like to see her laugh, performing comedy. I feel great respect for El ser querido; however, I would also ask it to awaken emotion in me. It does not happen.