Hot-Button Eviction Thriller starring Penélope Cruz points a righteous finger at landlords [Venice] – newsdubai

Heavy on Loachian social realism and supported by the intensity and heavy efforts of a Safdie Brothers flick, Juan Diego Botto‘s gritty eviction thriller”On the outskirts” – produced by Penelope Cruz, which also lends its name to the invoicing sheet – provides hard-hitting stuff. Premiere at The Venice Film Festival today in the Orrizonti section, here’s a piece of agitprop that feels as timely as ever, with the energy crisis raging across Europe, the cost of living soaring from country to country, and society’s most marginalized left wing up for grabs.

Anyone with half a heart and half a brain will quickly be won over by its interwoven stories, following three different people in the same Spanish town living under the cold, red-stamp eviction notices: slightly baggy in the second act, though. , the first and last 30 minutes are appropriately serious and affecting.

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Our story begins in a run-down apartment, where a lonely little girl cuts her finger open with a bread knife. Soon after, the police arrive looking for her absent mother: Sensing something is wrong, they take the tut back to the station to be looked after by child services (it’s a gut punch of a sequence, the child cries in a series of close-ups when she is carried out to the service van). Arriving just after the car leaves is Rafa (Louis Tosarbroken, exhausted, and just awesome) a good-hearted tenant rights lawyer chasing the car: not only does he know the child’s mother, he also knows that if she doesn’t pick up the girl at the end of the night, she will be taken into state custody.

Rafa’s quest to find the girl’s mother – all while trying to fit in his obligations to his pregnant wife and increasingly distant stepson – forms the central thrust of the story, with the other narrative strands intersecting in various ways. How we’re introduced to Cruz: Rafa is part of an anti-eviction collective that organizes to stop her family from being thrown out onto the street the following morning, escalating from protests at the local bank to direct action to stop their removal. Cruz is the obligatory big name here, the driving force behind interest in Venice and beyond, but Tosar is the real lynchpin: he packs a whole lot of bulging weapons into his performance of a man torn apart by his duties as a husband, who step-parent, and the weight of obligation on his shoulders to help the most needy. There are still a few days to go, but he is one of the highlights of the festival so far.

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There is also the quietly devastating story of an elderly woman trying to get in touch with her migrant son, so embarrassed by his work as an unskilled laborer that he avoids her calls. This one, told through a series of scenes depicting her muted, seemingly composed life in a cozy apartment, really starts to drag on – until, as debut director Botto’s habit seems, there’s one hell of a tragic rug pull that kicks off. your teeth. Although conventionally chronological and easy to follow, Botto and his scriptwriter Olga Rodriguez deserves credit for connecting all the narrative pieces in such an effective way.

A real heartbreaker, “On the Fringe” works as a solemn tearjerker without downplaying the crucial political message at its core. Its closing title card shows Spain’s more than a hundred evictions a day, a stat that’s even more devastating after the human impact is dramatized, though you might need a little more fury. And perhaps it is a reflection of the endlessness of the eviction epidemic – in Spain and across the globe, tenants in London, New York and beyond that they feel all too well about the plight of Botto’s subjects – but its final message of resistance, a literal freeze-frame of Cruz’s character…. well, resisting might be a bit trite for some. Either way, here’s a picture with the best of intentions, even if the familial conflicts resulting from this dire crisis have been easily explored in the cornucopia of social dramas before it. It’s well-traded across the board, and who can go wrong with a hot-button image that points the finger at landlords? [B-]

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