02/07/2023 - The feature debut by Itsaso Arana is a beautiful and moving picture about film serving as a mirror to our lives as well as a way to remember them

Helena Ezquerro, Bárbara Lennie, Irene Escolar, Itsaso Arana and Itziar Manero in The Girls Are Alright

For one week over the summer, four actresses and a writer head off to a village cut off from the rest of the world in order to rehearse a stage play, a period tale replete with princesses and 17^th-century costumes. During the days they spend living together, the girls will gradually get to know one another and share their private lives through their characters and the ideas set forth in the play. This is the approach taken by The Girls Are Alright [+see also:
trailer
interview: Itsaso Arana
film profile], the feature debut by filmmaker Itsaso Arana, starring Bárbara Lennie, Irene Escolar, Itziar Manero, Helena Ezquerro and the director herself, and presented in competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

The Girls Are Alright is a story with another fiction nestled within it, serving as something akin to a mirror. It’s a summer’s tale featuring a country house, an old mill, a river, a nighttime camp fire, a small-town open-air dance, missives, a toad, a scatterbrained prince, confessions and reflections about the things life throws at us. A film in which fantasy blends with reality, period elements with other, more modern ones, the present with the past and the future. The movie can’t help but bring to mind the films of Éric Rohmer – not just his “Tales of the Four Seasons”, but also his literary adaptations. Through a simple approach, employing a certain levity (and sense of humour) in the tone and the form, Itsaso Arana’s film manages to go into considerable depth as it talks about the complexity of subjects such as love, friendship, desire, motherhood, the growth process, the passing of time, solitude, beauty and its contradictory relationships with sadness and pain, loss, death, and the craft of acting and writing.

One of the shrewdest moves that the director has made lies in her decision to broach these topics from the baseline of the life stories of the very same actresses who star in the film, exploring and showing that complexity through their experiences and points of view. In this way, the movie manages to have a truthfulness to it; it conveys a spontaneity and an emotion that can sometimes be difficult to get across. In spite of it sometimes flirting with puerile or cheesy territory, and despite its naïve side, there is nothing artificial about this revelation of intimate details. There is also a mutual understanding between the actresses, as one can sense that unique familiarity you only get with friendship. Thanks to this, the film has a certain conversation-like quality, as the words of the characters spark an inner dialogue with the viewer.

In actual fact, Itsaso Arana does not say anything new with her feature debut, but what she does say, she gets across in a personal and eye-opening way, achieving something else that is also very difficult: ending up with a film very close to the one it appears she originally intended to make. Through a mise-en-scène making use of both classical and modern resources, from the thorough attention to detail to the stylised image, Arana creates her own cinematic space. But that visually accomplished form is not a mere vacuum; at its heart, the movie also arrives at the places it sets out to reach, even if some of them may be unexpected.

“I have a strange but beautiful job. Before, I used to be frightened by the idea that the films I’ve made will outlive me, and nevertheless, now that you’re alive, it’s so lovely to think about it like that. Films are also letters to the future,” says a pregnant Bárbara Lennie in one moving moment of the film. Therein lies the magic of The Girls Are Alright – in moments that, in a very straightforward way, say the whole truth. And thus, Itsaso Arana creates a beautiful and touching picture about fiction and reality, about film as a mirror of our lives and a way to remember them.

The Girls Are Alright is a production by Los Ilusos Films, which is being sold overseas by Bendita Film Sales and which Elastica Films will release in Spain on 25 August.

(Translated from Spanish)