Solitary Fragments
La Soledad

Spain, 2007, 130 Minute Running Time
Genre/Subjects: Drama, Foreign, Social Issues, Women's Issues
Program: Contemporary World Cinema
Language: English

DIRECTOR: Jaime Rosales
Producer: María José Díez, Ricard Figueras, José María Morales, Jaime Rosales
Editor: Nino Martínez
Screenwriter: Jaime Rosales, Enric Rufas
Cinematographer: Oscar Durán
Principal Cast: Sonia Almarcha, Petra Martínez

Stylish yet thoughtful, Spanish director Jaime Rosales' follow-up to The Hours of the Day is a closely observed study of isolation as a corollary of modern life.

Rosales unspools two briefly tangling narrative threads. One involves Adela, a separated office drone who has recently left her picturesque Basque home with her one-year-old son for Madrid, where she shares an apartment with Inès and tries to scrape by. The other centers on Inès' long-suffering mother, Antonia – a widowed shopkeeper who has a boyfriend, Manolo, to contend with as well as the constant squabbling among Inès and her two other grown daughters, Helena and Nieves. Both storylines initially adopt the idiom of the mundane: the characters' lives unfold as a series of everyday concerns over health, work, shelter, relationships and money. But darker forces are also at work in determining the directions Adela and Antonia eventually take – a terrorist bombing, a cancer diagnosis, mounting familial strife. If they never quite intersect, their paths do gradually prove parallel – and profoundly lonely.

Rosales' daringly heavy reliance on split screen proves effective in this regard. Simultaneously comparing and contrasting, uniting and dividing the dual protagonists, it highlights the forlornness implied by the title of this fractured family drama – as do the beautifully nuanced performances of both Sonia Almarcha as Adela and Petra Martínez as Antonia.