‘One year, one night’: The farce of memory

After surviving the attacks on the Bataclan theater in Paris on November 13, 2015, Ramón González wrote the nonfiction book ‘Paz, amor y Death metal’, the literary testimony of the mark he left on his life and memory that night. With this base, Isaki Lacuesta writes (together with Isa Campo and Fran Araújo) and directs ‘A year, one night’, address the trauma of violence from an emotional point of view in all its forms. Its protagonists are Ramón and Céline, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Noémie Merlant, a couple who went together to the “Eagles of Death Metal” concert in which four men shot the audience killing 89 people. The two came out of there as survivors, even though they made it separately; they are two victims, but very different; They experienced the same thing, but they don’t remember it in the same way.

The brain is a complex organ and the treacherous mind, capable of remembering based on emotions and storing in the subconscious the images it prefers to repress. Lacuesta told us that the novel’s author and her girlfriend were together in the same dressing room waiting to be released by the police and while she ensures they were completely in the dark, she is convinced that all the lights were on. About this dimorphism of “the truth” ‘One year, one night’ is structured with a double perspective, two points of view, that of the two characters, which intertwine as she begins to connect with her emotions. He, from the beginning, needs to talk about what happened, to remember everything, she puts on a shield and tries not to let anything penetrate, tries not to be a victim. The complex montage of the film becomes an enigma that neither they nor the audience really have to solve, just connect with it, with that pain they both react so differently to. They are two hours of stifling videos, in which it is not always possible to distinguish what happened and what could have happened.

Lacuesta made a film about love, also about the sense of guilt, misunderstanding, lack of communication, memory or fear; after all, life, not death, even if the trigger is the terror of an attack that has marked a country and its collective memory. This is why he has decided to leave out all explicit violence and prioritize defeating its consequences. There are no shots of people, no terrorists are seen, no bullet wounds, there is practically no blood, and what a great success. Therefore, the script focuses on the anguish of its two characters and respects the experience of those who survived the attack and the family and loved ones of those who did not. This sensitivity is also accentuated by the delicate work of image and sound, where the camera sneaks into the life of this couple as a voyeur who tries to intervene as little as possible, just look and collect. We understand Ramón’s nightmares from the outside, with the movement of the pupils in his closed eyes and the twitching of the veins in his foot. Details that make it one of the best films of the year and one of the most respectful and courageous.

Fight guilt and fear to keep going

Other themes that the film deals with more skill and that allow Lacuesta to introduce social criticism are the sense of guilt, fear and racism, the three being in constant collision. We face the guilt of surviving while others do not, the guilt of struggling to preserve our lives rather than caring for others, and the guilt of what fear can turn you into: a racist, a person who hates, the same feeling which allowed the terrorists to commit those attacks. The director and his team introduce a youth center into the story in which the character of Céline works. These adolescents already lived practically excluded from society and then, due to others who are not them, but who are similar to them, the racism that lurks in our society is seen even more validated to stigmatize them. And now comes the more complicated part, how do you fight xenophobia when it is both irrational and structural? Quim Gutiérrez, who plays one of Ramón and Céline’s friends who accompanied them to the concert, has a scene in which, shortly after the attacks and drunk, he confesses that he is not a racist, that he doesn’t want to be, but that you can’t go to the subway without being terrified when you see an Arab in a car. He is unconscious, he is almost physical and you have to fight him every day. But it can and must be done to move forward.

With so few characters, “One Year, One Night” couldn’t stand if Merlant and Pérez Biscayart weren’t two of the best performers in today’s cinema. We saw her in ‘Portrait of a woman in flames’, ‘Paris, 13th district’ and soon in ‘L’innocent’ and ‘Tár’; to him in ‘The Persian Teacher’, ‘120 beats per minute’ or ‘Everyone is dead’. Yeshis actions are vulnerable and subtle until they explode within all logic. They had a lot to convey with their eyes and bodies and they succeeded. They are accompanied in minor roles by Gutiérrez and Alba Guilera, and Enric Auquer, Natalia de Molina and C. Tangana also appear in their film debut.

Showing a violent terror scene like a shooting in that human mousetrap that was the Bataclan room that night without falling into morbidity was very difficult, but Lacuesta manages to shoot a sequence stronger than that of any horror film with apprehension and deference. “One Year, One Night” is a surprisingly warm but claustrophobic love story, the story of a love crushed by trauma, struggling to resist. Despite the fact that the bet to end up as a paradox of Schrödinger’s cat after a fragmented, repetitive and chaotic montage can be frustrating, this is the pain and this is how memories work, which don’t always respond to logic, even if you try. to impose it.

Note: 8

The best: Don’t pick a single story, or a single truth, or a perfect victim.

Worse: Maintaining an intensity level like this for two hours exhausts you until it gets too long.