‘The sky of animals’: the spell of brief (and rare) stories | Cinema: premieres and criticism

When filmmaker Robert Altman adapted in Short Cuts Raymond Carver’s work explained that his main attraction to the writer, genius of the brief, was his talent to convert the prosaic into poetry. The stories believe in the strength of the moment, in the small mysteries that crouch after the most insubstantial reality. The sky of animals, first book by writer David J. Poissant, connects with the robust tradition of the American story – and especially with Carver – from an essentially southern view, something that perhaps explain the attraction towards his imaginary of the Sevillian director Santiago Amodeo, who has adapted Poissant’s stories about death and loss with a suggestive mixture of melancholy, humor and strangeness.

Amodeo places The sky of animals in the aodine and peripheral places of a south more understood as a mental space than as a real territory. Under the subtitle “Stories about loss”, the director of the singular Astronauts (2003) y Dog head (2006) adapts a series of stories that make theirs through four episodes that occur in that border place in which life sees death.

The swimmer, the end of Darío, the lizard man y How to help die to a loved one They summon a series of characters touched by the melancholy of what ends, a feeling that contributes that The sky of animals be shot in film and not in digital. Amodeo thus creates a dream atmosphere in which a young woman without an arm furrows a pool like a siren or the primitive presence of a crocodile (of those who abound in Florida) also makes sense in the marshes of the Guadalquivir.

The swimmer y How to help die to a loved one They open and close the whole with a double story that repeats characters. It is the most successful and transparent, with two solitary beings played by Raúl Arévalo and Paula Díaz. The first story stops at your meeting; The second, in his farewell. In both, Arévalo and Díaz captivate their way of transmitting their helplessness. Between one and the other, Amodeo places the other two stories, which appeal more directly to the animals of the title. If a snake bite determines the amputated life of The swimmerin The end of Darío The threat, with apocalyptic dyes, comes from a hive of bees. In The lizard man It is a crocodile in captivity that contains another type of threat, that of badly resolved or broken family ties.

In all of them, the background is the duel, or the fear of death, but also the traces of a damaged society without remedy, a recurrent backdrop in the universe of a director whose previous film, The Gentiles (2021), made an incursion into adolescent nihilism. As then, Amodeo returns to his most personal and interesting path, that place where the strange and brief aspires to reveal something else.