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Basque director Javier Giner’s “This Solitude” (“Esta Soledad”) recently premiered at the San Sebastián Film Festival’s New Directors section on Sept. 23. Giner is the creator and co-director of the Disney+ series “I,
Addict,” based on his autobiographical book by the same name. It earned lead actor Oriol Pla the International Emmy for Best Actor.
Also starring Pla, “This Solitude” follows Leo and Lorea after their five-year relationship has ended. Each of them has to figure out how to continue living life on their own in Bilbao. Leo is a struggling actor who has to work as a grocery clerk to make ends meet while taking care of his disabled father. Lorea is a troubled writer who looks to a former prison inmate for companionship. Both must confront their loneliness and unresolved issues and look for meaning in a world that can sometimes feel cruel and scary.
“The film is about people who are losing control of their lives. Loneliness may be one of the few truly democratic things in life; what isn’t democratic are the resources we have to survive it,” Giner told Variety.
The film stars Pal, Marina Salas (“Join Me for Breakfast”), Gemma Martínez, Kai Etxaniz and Itziar Lazkano. Giner co-wrote the film with Luisa Matienzo, who is also one of the film’s producers along with Miguel Torrente. The production companies are Balance Media Entertainment, Fuga de Cuerpos, La Embajada TV and Basajaun Filmak. International sales are being handled by Filmax and they will release the film theatrically in Spain on Oct. 30.
Variety interviewed Javier Giner after the film’s premiere in San Sebastián.
There is a loneliness epidemic around the world and this film seems to address it.
Javier Giner: I didn’t set out to make a film about the loneliness epidemic. I’m a little wary of starting a film with a theme. This began with the desire to create, more than a film, an emotional state that would stay with the audience after they left the theater.
I looked around me and saw people with apparently full lives — jobs, friends, partners, phones that never stop, social media — and yet they were profoundly lonely and exhausted. I was fascinated by the contradiction: we’ve never had so many tools to avoid being alone and, paradoxically, so many ways of never truly connecting with anyone.
Is this story also autobiographical like your book “I, Addict”?
Giner: Everything I write is autobiographical in some way, but not in the sense that “I, Addict” was, where I was explicitly telling the story of a period in my own life. In “Esta Soledad,” the autobiography is in the gaze and in the emotions: Sadness, family relationships, certain ways of loving, the fear of losing someone, the feeling of not knowing what to do with your life. More and more, what interests me is whether what I write is emotionally true. To me, that is a deeper form of autobiography, and something I find endlessly fascinating.
The film is also about absent parents, both physically and emotionally. Do you think this is especially true for the new generation?
Giner: I think every generation inherits from the previous one not only its traumas, but also its emotional vocabulary, including the things it never had words for. The parents in “Esta Soledad” are not monsters. Even when they cause pain, they love their children and they do the best they can. But loving someone and knowing how to love someone are two very different things.
Children end up living with the emotional consequences of decisions they never made. I think we all spend part of our lives trying to understand what we received from our parents, and another part deciding what we’re going to do with it.
You chose to work with Oriol Pla again after “I, Addict.”
Giner: Oriol and I have something more valuable than simply understanding each other: we trust each other completely. And trust allows for things that are far more interesting and profound than comfort.
After “I, Addict,” we had already gone through some very emotionally demanding places together, so now we can arrive on set and barely need to talk. Sometimes a word or a look is enough. Or I can simply tell him, “I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. Let’s find it together.”
Oriol can be explosive, physical, unpredictable, almost animalistic, and five seconds later he can do something tiny that breaks your heart. Very few actors can inhabit both of those extremes. As an actor, he’s a Stradivarius, and on top of that he’s an incredible human being. He’s my brother, my partner.
Bilbao seems to be a central character in the film, sometimes portrayed as lonely, dark and gritty. Would you agree?
Giner: Yes, although I never wanted to film Bilbao as a sad city, but rather as a state of mind. I wanted to film what almost never gets filmed anymore: not the postcard, but the humidity, the noise, the architecture, the industrial memory, that light that can change completely within a matter of minutes. There is something very physical about the city; at times, it almost seems to weigh on the bodies.
That connected with Leo and Lorea. Their external world remains exactly where it was while everything inside them has changed completely. The streets are the same, but they no longer mean the same thing. I believe strongly in that: Cities don’t change when we suffer; the way we look at them does. So Bilbao wasn’t there to illustrate their sadness. It had to remain indifferent to it. And paradoxically, that indifference is what ultimately makes the city so deeply emotional.
