Nominated for Best Director (Isabel Coixet) and Best Performance (Laia Costa)
Q&A with Isabel Coixet & Marisa Fernandes Armenteros
Escaping her overwhelming life in the city, 30-year-old Natalia finds refuge in the small village of La Escapa, deep in the Spanish countryside. When confronted with the hostility of her landlord and the distrust of the local villagers, Nat finds herself giving in to an unsettling sexual proposal from her neighbour Andreas.
Isabel Coixet’s Un Amor skewers the northern Spanish countryside as a place of comical want, where barter is normal and everything is broken. But when urban pixie Nat moves in, weird men start circling like the local vultures.
Though based on Sara Mesa’s bestseller of the same name, El Pais’s ‘Book of the Year’ 2020, Un Amor is far indeed from a typical adaptation of a romantic novel. A closeup of a faded 1930s sign advertising ‘Bread for Sale’ signals that director Isabel Coixet (The Bookshop) and crack cinematographer Bet Rourich (The Orphanage) are deep in conversation with Luis Buñuel, wrestling with their country’s rural poverty and astonishing landscapes as much as with the story material, which is by turns funny and painful.
Fleeing stress and urban prices, translator Nat (brilliantly portrayed by Laia Costa, Only You) moves into a long-uninhabited cottage in the shadow of vulture-infested towers of rock. She acquires an untrainable scar-faced mongrel who won’t eat dog food, and a vegetable patch where ‘nothing grows … even by accident’.
Civil war damage resonates with Nat’s harrowing translations of African war refugees’ testimony. A breeding pair of vapid Anglophiles bring money to the area, but nothing of value. Another neighbour who offers Nat roof repair in exchange for ‘rapid’ sex (‘I don’t want to bother you’) and a skeevy landlord contribute to the setting’s over-the-top awfulness.
Against the odds, opposites attract. But at what cost?
Daniel MacCannell
This film is Triple F Rated.
