In the Madrid of 2008, battered by the banking and real estate crisis, and mass unemployment, the ringing of an alarm clock, strident. The countdown begins. This is the start of a film that will gallop over 1:43, following the crossed destinies of several characters stuck in an alarming daily life. Produced by Penélope Cruz, À contretemps, the first feature film by Argentinian director Juan Diego Botto sets up three parallel plots. On the one hand, we follow Rafa (Luis Tosar, very convincing). This lawyer specializing in social law, who had to take his stepson on a school trip, sets out to find the mother of a little girl left alone in unsanitary accommodation. If he does not contact the mother before midnight, the little one will be placed in a home… The second plot features a couple with a young child unjustly threatened with expulsion.
Played by Penélope Cruz, this supermarket employee is betting everything on an anti-eviction collective, which is fighting in solidarity against an administration overwhelmed by events, while her husband, who works in the building industry, is instead thinking of expatriating his small family to Argentina. The last story shows the steps of a lonely old lady who stands surety for her bankrupt son. These narrative frames will come together, showing that everything is linked. Between thriller and social chronicle, À contretemps plunges the spectators into a race against time at the heart of a painful reality evoking in turn injustice, solidarity and resilience. The sense of urgency is palpable throughout the film.
In the role of Azucena, a combative wife who struggles in the tightly braided meshes of a dramatic daily reality without giving up, Penélope Cruz offers a more sober, darker game, all with suppressed anger. Quite far from the romantic register to which the muse of Spanish cinema, immortalized by Pedro Almodovar, had accustomed us. But it is the character of the humanist and stubborn lawyer, played by Luis Tosar, who wins all the votes.
Block of vigor, determination and altruism, he struggles with the energy of despair, like a fly caught in a spider’s web. Juan Diego Botto’s straight-forward staging bets on realism, without being miserable. One thinks of course of the social cinema of Ken Loach, that of the Dardenne brothers and even sometimes that of Stéphane Brizé… But this captivating Madrid suspense in the form of immersion as close as possible to the dysfunctions of our modern societies, has its own DNA: a hint of Iberian toughness mixed with charm and warm hope.
The opinion of Figaro: 3/4