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esc Gay is a director with a very keen ear for capturing the sounds of the city and the voices of its people. Of any city, although he finds a better melody in the most current or "modern" hum of big cities, like Barcelona in En la ciudad or Madrid in Truman. He makes a cinema of writing, of stories that sniff out human relationships, of couples, generational, friendly, cohabitation, sexual, transversal… (remember the capacity for portraits, personalities and conflicts in Una pistola en cada mano) and he presents his narrative, his cinematographic style, always somewhat subject to the brilliance of the text and to the strength and success of his interpreters in placing the sharp, direct, warm or poisoned replies in precise rhythm… His cinema does not avoid its aroma of boards, of stage, and does not lose an ounce of energy in hiding that it carries within the soul of a theatrical performance.
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And his latest film, Sentimental, is the staging and filming of one of his theatrical pieces that premiered with notable success in Barcelona and Madrid under the title Los vecinos de arriba, with a change in the cast that, for its cinematographic adaptation, is composed of Javier Cámara, Griselda Siciliani, Belén Cuesta and Alberto San Juan, the double and disparate couple who clash in that unique space of one of their homes and who, in more or less real time (it lasts the barely two hours that a dinner between neighbors lasts), unravel that whole catalog of discords that corrode coexistence, but essentially directed (or provoked) by the affective and its most combative relative, the sexual.
The plot pretext, which, apparently, has its origin in a personal anecdote of Cesc Gay, is pure humorous material: a long-term couple, devoted to routine and serene dispute, invites the upstairs couple to dinner, who maintain noisy sexual relations that disrupt their peaceful nocturnal coexistence. And in that humorous tone, so suitable for ironic comedy, of incisive intelligence, it gradually gets lost during the evening in a drama that darkens, although without losing its grace and corrosion at any moment.
Cesc Gay builds the characters on screen, wrapping them in transparent paper through which they reveal their interior and intimacy: the traditional couple (Javier Cámara and Griselda Siciliani), he is obsessive, cynical, and a musician, and she is resigned, conformist, but alive; and the "modern" couple, far from all kinds of sexual prejudices (Alberto San Juan and Belén Cuesta), he is a firefighter with a quick hose, and she is a psychologist with an even quicker judgment. The clash is as colorful and amusing as it is profound and fateful, and it constitutes all the folds, appearances, and truths that are cooked up in the story.
The dramatic progression is fortunate and full of surprises, both for the protagonists and for the viewer, and everyone adapts to the twists and fierceness of the dialogues and the pirouettes of the situations, some of them frankly uncomfortable. It effortlessly recalls the emotional framework of films like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Mazursky, 1969) or Consenting Adults (Pakula, 1992), but especially Yasmina Reza's play, God of Carnage, or its cinematic version made by Roman Polanski in 2011.
The dramatic progression is fortunate and full of surprises, both for the protagonists and for the viewerAs is obvious in this type of cinema that depends so much on the aim of its actors, the interpretation is what marks the hierarchy of the function, and in that sensethe great surprise, the white blackbird, is the actress Griselda Siciliani, Argentina and a debutante in Spanish cinema, who composes her character, Ana, a tied-up wife but with an enormous wild zone inside her, with incredible suggestion, strength and talent for origami in the unexpected folds of her role. Javier Cámara, Alberto San Juan and Belén Cuesta, so well known by all, know how to season with grace, ingenuity and venom the sweet and bitter of thisfable about square minds and round beds, or vice versa.