Decades ago, when one wanted to appear cultureta and disavow trash TV, one used to utter the well-known phrase "I only watch documentaries on La 2." Yours truly has always been a great lover of both extremes and I enjoyed many sleepless nights admiring how Coto Matamoros, visibly high on cocaine, insulted journalist Carmen Hornillos in that theatrical masterpiece called Crónicas Marcianas. At the same time, I was thrilled to spend afternoons devouring every last documentary on Televisión Española's most alternative channel, whether it focused on the much-suffered life of Thompson's gazelle in the meadows of North Africa or one of the many films dedicated to the Nazi holocaust and its moral atrocities. Over time, the documentary genre has embedded itself in my taste in an almost addictive way and it is easy to see how, year after year, it surpasses the vast majority of fiction films, however independent they may be.
Señor, llévame pronto is a splendid film about the life of Carmen, an 86-year-old woman, weary of a life overflowing with wars and scares, who decides to commit suicide.At this point I have thought especially during the current film course, when I have been forced to swallow unbearable movie duds like ConclaveandEmilia Pérez,products with some design and production successes, but with screenwriterssemiwokesthat we should send to the galleys. Instead, I could tell you about dozens of excellent documentaries, which is relevant to celebratethis year's edition of DocsBarcelona(Sunday is ending, you still have time),a festival entirely dedicated to the genre that is a true balm. This year the festival organizers have stated that theirleitmotivit would be the crisis and the fragility of Europe (which is more than evident indocumentsexplicitly political likeRiefenstahl, Rabbit à la Berlin, Facing War, Mr. Nobody against Putinand etc.); but I would say that the most relevant films are those that deal with the philosophical, social, and also emotional effects of that fall on the most ordinary people imaginable.
It is in this sense that I have especially enjoyed films such as A 9-Month Contract (Ketevan Vashagashvili), The Dialogue Police (Susanna Edwards), Only on Earth (Robin Petré) and, above all, the surprising documentary Señor, llévame pronto by Guillermo F. Flórez; this is a splendid film about the life of Carmen, an eighty-six-year-old woman, weary of a life full of wars and scares, who decides to commit suicide.
The filmmaker follows her during her last months ---she herself has dictated the sentence of her own death on October 12, just when she was ordained a nun---, and thus we learn about her time in the ecclesiastical establishment, her subsequent marriage, divorce, and unbridled sexual life but, above all, we hear her reflect on why she wants to end her journey with a disturbing mixture of chotería and intellectual serenity. She tells us that she is well, has no serious illness, but that she has lived long enough.
Throughout this process until the day of her suicide (we could draw acrobatic parallels between Carmen's death and the transfer of Europe, and they would be far from trivial), the filmmaker F. Flórez accompanies his protagonist, listens to her without judging her, and seeks to understand her until her last night of existence. It is magnificent to see how this histrionic stranger prepares her death as a rite of personal affirmation; this ranges from the choice of the poison with which she wants to die, to how she gets rid of her furniture to give it to friends, and slowly burns her untransferable documentary production (photographs, diaries, and video or cassette tapes that no one will ever see or hear again). All this, it must be insisted, is seen clinically by a filmmaker who does not crush us to over-emotionalize, but rather has the delicacy to leave a free path for thought.
I insist that documentaries like this one should be re-linked to the theme of Europe's half-death and all those political and vital certainties that the old continent had guaranteed us. All of this is suddenly disappearing, who knows if ---for us--- traumatically or in a mocking way, which is how Carmen by Guillermo F. Flórez decides to leave life. A beautiful work, just over an hour long, that is worth much more than all the Hollywood crap of this unbearable year of so much visual propaganda.