At the end of “Los Domingos,” the protagonist, a teenager who wants to become a cloistered nun, prays in the church after her grandmother’s funeral. He cries and asks God to show up, to say something, to do something. And suddenly she … His face lights up and he starts laughing with ecstatic joy, and he sure feels something all over his body, just like the Sufis. I think that laugh is what made a lot of people discuss the movie. That laugh contains the secret and benefit of the story.
Between Alauda Ruiz de Azúa and Rosalía’s “Lux” in “Icon”, they took the opportunity to talk about the existence of “monjamania” in Spain. And they added another element to the equation: the podcast “Las hijas de Felipe,” in which two historians (Ana Garriga and Carmen Orbita) sit down to talk under the subtitle “Everything that happens to you actually happened to a nun in the 16th and 17th centuries.” There appear Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, Santa Rosa de Lima, Sister María Jesús de Ágreda… In each chapter, they count the number of times they mention Saint Teresa of Jesus, to whom not long ago Paula Ortiz dedicated a film adaptation of a play by Juan Mayorga. Isambard Wilkinson took up the challenge and wrote about it in The Times, comparing Rosalía to Bernini’s Saint Teresa, and recalling the CIS data highlighted by Diego Jarocho two weeks ago in El País: between 2023 and 2025, the percentage of professed Catholicism in Spain for those under 35 years of age rose from 34% to 41%. We are only a few texts away from repeating these arguments like a mantra or a prayer.
There is something that breaks when we read a cultural work with a sociological key, which is grace. Suddenly, the story was no longer the result of an artist’s inspiration, calling, and inquiry, but a sample of a larger, more important trend, a minor piece, an excuse to write a column, or to discuss, or to sell, and so on. I’ve seen people angry at Rosalía for wearing white, and others trying to find a general message hidden in her letters, a coded message that is part, who knows, of a hidden Vatican plan to evangelize new generations (“We should speak their language, like ‘When We Went to America’, and so on). I suppose the latter had a hard time finding the theological thread that united “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” from Rosalía’s tune with “I’ll Fuck You Till You Love Me” from “Berghain”, a phrase that by the way comes from Myke Tyson and with what gospel do we explain the malice of “Pearl”? Is it blasphemy to call God “stalker” and why “Sauvignon Blanc” and not red and Spanish wines? I don’t know if we are fed up with craftsmanship or doctrine. What I do know is that we have lost the game.
Rosalía said Simone Weil was one of her greatest inspirations for “Lux”. In fact, he paraphrases it in Italian: “Con te, la gravità graziosa e la grazia è grave.” For me, it’s that humor that makes me think. Just like Ainara’s laugh in Los Domingos.
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