The actor Johnny Depp has been the first to bring his charm to the Gràcia neighborhood, and the press conference for the film Minamata was a magnificent occasion to have a good time: he arrived late, very late, and with that charm of someone who wants to be forgiven; so charming, that he got confused and gave Picasso's Guernica to the city: "It's a pleasure to be in Barcelona, where somewhere the Guernica is located" (?). His appearance was as expected, with the tumbao of a bad night behind him, his usual newsboy cap, and with that prodigious voice that serves equally well to say a silly line from pirate Jack Sparrow or a line from Shakespeare.
In the film he presented at the BCN Film Festival, directed by Andrew Levitas, he plays the famous photojournalist Eugene Smith and his ordeal in Minamata, a coastal city in Japan that in the seventies suffered a terrible and devastating mercury poisoning caused by industrial negligence. The actor confessed to feeling very connected to the character, to his intimate wounds and to his extreme ways of placating pain and maintaining his gaze (referring, no doubt, to his great self-destructive capacities).
But, let's go back to Barcelona and the pleasure of seeing it get dressed up these days of Festival and cinema. One leaves Casa Fuster and listening to Johnny Depp's dark velvet voice, goes to eat something at Pepa Tomate (that's the name of a restaurant in Gràcia near the Verdi Cinemas, on a stretch of hill that doesn't give you a stitch when running to the next movie) and at the next table is Isabelle Huppert, the great French actress who comes to Barcelona to present the film Mama Maria, which will be in the next festival chronicle. Eating next to Huppert, so sharp, so redhead, so natural and discreet, is not easy, as one cannot avoid remembering some of her characters on screen (let's say in The Piano Teacher, by Michael Haneke, or in Elle, by Paul Verhoeven) and the soup thickens in one's mouth.
And already entering the cinema, the Festival allows us to talk about a couple of films, the one that opened, Promising Young Woman, by Emerald Fennell, and the Spanish Solo una vez, by Guillermo Ríos, which, without having anything to do with each other, hold a powerful common point: both confront the unpleasant issue of machismo and abuse. Which already calls for a parenthesis (the coincidence in spaces and times of Johnny Depp, who drags serious legal problems after being accused of abuse by his ex-wife, also actress Amber Heard, with these two titles, can only be attributed to chance).
Promising Young Woman tells a terrible story of rape, humiliation, and revenge, although it does so by mixing intrigue with notable black humor, and straying from the usual tracks of the genre in the treatment of violence. And it has the magnificent and well-colored performance by Carey Mulligan, who is nominated for the upcoming Oscars as one of the favorites. The Spanish Solo una vez is less ambitious, less radical, but has other virtues: the confrontation between a psychologist and a couple who have to undergo therapy after he was reported for abuse by her father, functions as a thermometer that intelligently raises and lowers the temperature. The performances by Álex García and Silvia Alonso are exceptional and one devours the tones and profiles of their characters as if they were a turkey canapé.