“Gulbis”: Rafael Cobos’ landmark debut with the glorification of Quinque cinema | Cinema: premieres and reviews

Not many Spanish screenwriters manage to step out of the shadow of the great directors with whom they write their stories. However, those who achieve this usually gain a shining status: that of co-authorship. Although they are never behind the camera, their contribution is considered so valuable that to identify their work both names are often mentioned together: that of the director who films, and the co-screenwriter who writes. Isabel Peña, a frequent collaborator of Rodrigo Sorogoyen, is one of those exceptions. And Rafael Cobos, alongside Alberto Rodriguez since then 7 virgins, It is the other great case in contemporary Spanish cinema.

Until there comes a moment when, in addition to reaching this category, they feel the need to look within themselves, to take a step towards directing individual projects. Cobos, with ten titles with Rodriguez – eight films and two series; Two Goya Screenwriting Awards The lower island and The man with a thousand faces—, He made his debut as a director with the wonderful series The left-handed son (2023), about the violence of a group of far-right youth, focusing on the mother of one of them. Now he continues his solo career as a director blows, An unmistakably his own work, some of the social and political concerns on display juxtapose with Rodriguez’s, and a tone that borders on the poetic, is also characteristic of the pair. A film by a writer, but also by a director, with linguistic contributions that reveal an artist who is not content to be a storyteller.

Transition has been one of the great themes for Rodriguez and Cobos. Al-Jazeera Al-Sughra Model 77 and Anatomy of a moment They analyzed a turbulent period at the intermediate levels (police, prisons, lawyers, unions…) and at the highest levels (monarchy, presidency, army). But now Cobos has decided to descend into the mire, to the lowest strata of those years of controlled chaos, street-level ferocity, and social and moral misery, with a protagonist so distinctive in that life and in the cinema of his time: the quintet. But he is not just a child of politics and ideals. Thus the post-civil war era merges with the early 1980s in a beautiful prologue that shows the disasters of war in the characters of two children and an anti-Franco father who considered that his gang should not end.

In those foregrounds from the 1940s, and in the first images from the 1980s, there are some great virtues Visits. The exquisite art direction of the exterior and interior designs by Gigia Pellegrini; Broncoyo soundtrack; And the exquisite care for the image (and not just for the writing), as a kind of sublimation of that quintet cinema of Eloy de la Iglesia and Carlos Saura (José Antonio de la Loma was on another political side, much further to the right), to which was added an aggravated retrospective lyricism, yes, more composed than instinctive: the celluloid cuts, the dirty and shabby image, in the opening credits; Triana songs. Transitions between sequences with documentary photographs of the people of the time; The girl’s character is perhaps underdeveloped, although she nails the style, hairstyle and romanticism of Berta Soquilamos. Faster, faster.

The lead role of Jesús Carrozza, who was born and raised in cinema thanks to Cobos and Rodriguez, indicates their shared past. Also the classical structure, created in the script with Fernando Navarro; The blood relationship between the two brothers (Carozza and Luis Tosar: the quinque and the policeman), which is related The night is ours Written by James Gray (another contemporary classic), and with the same Cobos touch that unites lyricism, narrative and worldliness, with the hackneyed painted-paper covers of city magazines as symbol. But there are also excellent novelties, especially montage games, inserts that subvert sequential continuity to convey emotion to an unexpected dimension.

Cobos’s feature debut is a film about the physical defeat of two losers and the Spain that gave birth to them. But also about the moral triumph of those who lived and created a time that was as tense as it was exciting.