Corazón embalsamado

What would a film be like if it had a fever? Might it be like a film in which wakefulness, dreams and memories are confused? Or a film which stirs up childhood and teenage years, jumbled together, as in a distant present? A film where the present is blurry, seen close up, seen almost with your hands, while the past, in turn, comes apart on enigmatic old home video tapes? Is it a film full of mysteries, secrets, lies and swindles? A film of bed sheets, heat and sweat, doors that shouldn’t be closed and doors that shouldn’t be opened, bodies that strike each other, that dance, that vomit, that hide their desires, that slink off secretly, of embalmed hearts, communion wafers and saliva? Are childhood and adolescence a fever when you live in the shadow of a religious education, yearning to know what’s under a virgin’s cloak, spying on bodies, feeling like you can’t breathe? Who can’t breathe? The virgin behind her glass, the city under the sun, the teenage girl who can only go out in secret? Maybe that virgin, that city and that girl are one and the same? Isn’t that also feverish, feeling the flesh and blood of our body and at the same time feeling that our body isn’t entirely ours, that it is muddled with the world, with the air weighing down, with the walls around us, with the heat and dust of the street, with all the other bodies, the other flesh, the other blood? Wouldn’t a feverish film be able to tell us something true about memory?

Pablo García Canga