The Good Letter: Celia Rico gives a deep and vibrant voice to the silence of women in the post-war period (***)

Minimalism is largely defined by its provocative nature. It's not so much what is seen as what the viewer constructs and imagines around what is being contemplated. To be more precise, one could say that it is the viewer, not the artist, who, from their position as reader, crafts the deepest part of the work. La buena letra (The Good Letter), by Celia Rico Clavellino, is, if you will, the most extreme and clear example of a minimalist tendency that the director has been composing and maturing throughout two works as transparent and full as Viaje al cuarto de una madre (Journey to a Mother's Room ) and Los pequeños amores (Little Loves). In both cases, what counts is the long, profound silence that envelops the conversations, debts, and wounds between a mother and daughter; what is relevant is always the back of the screen, the back of all the suffering. And so on.

Now, a step further, the silence, always culpable, is even deeper, more universal, and much more painful. The idea of ​​the director's third film is none other than to find the powerful echo of an overwhelming silence. It is the silence of an entire generation of women, those who lived through the postwar period and under Franco's regime. And to do so, always true to itself, allowing the viewer to reassemble and assemble the loose pieces carefully and precisely left on the screen. The audience is invited (even provoked) to complete what they see with the fragments of their own memory, a shared and yet erased memory; a memory, despite so much forgetting, exaggeratedly present in the bodies of women from the aftermath and, more to the point, from now.

The film is based on Rafael Chirbes' novel of the same name. It tells the story of a Valencian village after the Civil War. There, the character played by Loreto Mauleón does the impossible to sow normality amidst so much silent horror. She is the almost invisible center that sustains everything, sacrifices everything, silences everything. Her husband (Roger Casamajor) accepts the humiliation of allowing himself to be humiliated precisely in order to survive. And her brother-in-law (Enriq Auquer) chooses to flee the same humiliation as before. All three (or rather, all without exception) have lost and, silently, let the others and themselves know it. Time passes, and the fugitive returns. He does so with a woman (Ana Rujas) and, little by little, learns another form of survival: serving the master, the victor, without a trace of shame. And, in the middle, always, the character of Mauleón, as an unacknowledged witness to a sacrifice that never ends.

The director wisely (and minimalistically) constructs the film in the detail of everything that's barely visible. The protagonist cooks, sews, works, cares... and does it all tirelessly in the background of the narrative while the action, the supposedly important one, always led by the man, runs energetically toward perhaps nowhere. And it's in this background, almost off-screen, where the character of a Mauleón very close to perfection reigns, where La buena letra becomes strong and grand. Perhaps the problem with the film, and there is one, is that at times it forgets the rigor of its own minimalist approach and lets the narration, that of the foreground, take on a prominence it doesn't deserve and which, in truth, ends up being too erratic. At times, in its haphazard back and forth, without ever being entirely clear why, the film confuses and becomes confused.

Whatever the case, what remains is a proposal as provocative as it is precise, profound and intimate, silent and deafening at the same time, appealing to the viewer with the clarity of a cinema that, like Chirbes's own literature, refuses to be forgotten as its almost sole and ultimate goal. Big cinema. Minimalism definitely has nothing to do with small.

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Directed by Celia Rico Clavellino. Starring : Loreto Mauleón, Enric Auquer, Roger Casamajor, Ana Rujas. Running time : 110 minutes. Nationality : Spanish.