World premiere
Having lost her memory, A. could barely recall glimpses of her childhood in Argentina. After her death, her son visits the empty house for the last time. A sensory walk through permanence, passing, and the scattered pieces that make the self.
A film about grandmas with (almost) no grandma: a film about absence. A very present absence. Even the title itself says something and yet nothing at the same time. ‘A’ is the first letter of the deceased grandmother’s name and yet its incompleteness immediately says something about loss —of a loved one, of a place where experiences were had, of memory. It is the first letter of the alphabet —A for Abuela, Amnesia, Ausencia, Apartamento, Adiós [grandmother, amnesia, absence, apartment, goodbye, in Spanish][g1] — or merely an open-ended inscription that everyone can make their own. A single letter; as if the words are missing or as if nothing more needs to be said. It sums up the precision and efficiency of a film that manages to convey loss and farewell in just 15 shots using a domestic camera without fully becoming a film about bereavement. It is sensitive and sensory. The film has a singular rhythm much like a heartbeat: the cadence of slow panoramic movements from one side to the other; and the dry pulsing sound of the shoes worn by a silhouette-shadow of a man walking the empty hallways from one end to the other. Those footsteps produce one echo while other echoes, the echoes of a conversation, can be heard in the distance. However, the words being spoken cannot be discerned. Perhaps therein lies the reason why it is so moving: what can be heard above all are the tones of voice, the atmosphere, the odd sentence spoken around the cakes, a photograph being taken. These could be the sounds of any Sunday visit to an elderly grandmother. A visit that seems to be taking place in the room with the door ajar at the end of the hallway. But as we begin to realise that a house cannot be so bare, a certain anxiety grows and the phantasmal materialises. The dialogues from the past, which start again once the father emerges, lend an air of haunted house to the apartment. An amnesiac, sick and derailed haunting. The dialogues seem stuck in the walls. Will the self portrait of the filmmaker also be trapped in the mirror? And therein lies the displacement operated by Ramón Balcells: the walls are the main characters. Although they look like simple white walls —like empty screens— that is not entirely what they are. Even though the image is not fully in focus, a fly can be seen on the last one; a black smudge moving about the space, just as the father did previously. Here, the walls are alive, they remember, they ooze voices, they sing #mezcla de rabia, de dolor, de fe y de ausencia# and cry innocence with the tango of Tita Merello, cut short like a slamming door. Walls have more than just ears.
Frédérique Monblanc