Chavalas, by Carol Rodríguez Colás

Watch the movie “Chavalas” completely free on RTVE PLAY.

The turtles eat divinely on gazpacho. Until they end up dying, God knows why. And people never keep their most authentic portraits when they take their ID photo, another thing that no one can understand. Strangeness brings us so close to the everyday because, after all, we all participate in that strangeness and estrangement around a reality that always advances in a hurry.

Even things happen just as fast for some neighborhood girls like the ones in the movie. Only the carving of their names remains on a bench overlooking the block of flats that was always there for them, hiding any possible splendorous sunset. A face brick titan without balconies.

It is the world of Marta, Desi, Bea and Soraya, the four Cornellá girls who share everything in the meantime of what remains of their youth. Even at the cost of centrifugal forces that always end up pushing to relocate each one in the most unsuspected place. You can already have dreams of a photographer in Stockholm like Marta or a bar full of canaries like Angela. Everything happens.

That is why it ends up being fascinating to discover that moment, that capture overexposed in the light of the vitality of the twenties. From Barcelona to Cornellá it must be a few bus stops, but there are no more distant universes at the same time. The question to direct a film like this is knowing how to open the shutter to the maximum to load what happens with realism. No kitsch or ad hoc movie fixes. What happens to these girls is so true that they make you feel part of their group.

In other words, nothing to do with romantic formulas, version of American youth movies. Marta may be wrong again at the last minute, we will never know. Once the roots are assumed, a calmer one travels. And there will be time to stumble again, if at all. The question is knowing that those friends will be there again to pick up a bruised Marta if the decision turns out to be a failure.

The beginning and the end of the story. Marta's need to escape from her neighborhood at all costs and the discovery of the identity forged in those streets as a necessary elixir for any creator, whether you were raised in a mansion or a favela. The development meanwhile exudes an overwhelming authenticity with an idealized point of friendship but with the rawness towards the happiness of the moments.

And also a point of what could be called female empowerment. Because these girls are also those women from a liberated generation, undoubtedly facing obstacles that are still firm but convinced that being a woman is doing whatever comes out of your pussy. Without a doubt, a story to enjoy and to recover lost horizons, those of those days that many of us can only contemplate from old photos.

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