Malena Villa is hot. The actress and singer, visiting La Plata again (she sang a song with Chano on Friday) has to get on and off a 520 bus with a novento look and cross Plaza Moreno, over and over again, while they film that little scene, her, getting off the bus. And again. It’s 2 in the afternoon, it’s over 35 degrees. The rest of the filming crew is safe, as best they can, sheltered under some little tents, covered by little caps. But Malena Villa no. So when the film’s director says “cut,” she sits down, weary, and turns on a small handheld fan. She and she tries to breathe. The B-side of the cinema, devoid of glamour, with sweat stains.
Villa is one of the three protagonists of “El llanto”, the film that spent its last days of filming in the City and will return in two weeks to close the filming, a co-production between Spain, France and Argentina directed by Pedro Martín-Calero and that tells two stories: that of Andrea, who in the present, in Madrid, has discovered that she is adopted and that her biological mother has just died; and that of Camila, in the past, in La Plata, who tries to find her voice as a filmmaker in a masculine world when, getting off a bus, she finds Marie.
“Three women, separated in time and space, but united by an evil that, without their knowing it, connects them all,” says the director, who wrote the script together with Isabel Peña, a regular partner, in dialogue with EL DIA by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and who comes from writing the acclaimed “As Bestas”.
Pedro Martín-Calero’s first feature film, “El llanto” is a “modern horror” film
“El llanto” is a genre film, horror, but “modern”, defines Pedro Martín-Calero. “A film of characters, not of scares, of fears: we wanted the terror to come from the characters,” explains the director, who in this sense is connected to the trend of horror films in recent years, less concerned with gore. and the “jump-scares” and more concerned with allegories and climates.
“El terror”, says the Spanish filmmaker, who directs his first feature film with “El llanto”, “seems to have entered an adult stage, beyond fright. I am interested in this new wave, I think it is beginning and that it is going to make it a more taken into account genre”.
In this sense, “with Isabel Peña we have tried to transcend the genre a bit: we want to penetrate a very important issue in society, which hurts us both a lot,” says the director. However, what the film seeks is that this intention “is not very evident”, it is “above all a horror film where many things happen and, if you want, you can read below”.
The director and screenwriter of “El llanto”, filming Malena Villa
Martín-Calero does not want to reveal too much about the theme that runs beneath the surface, because “I don’t want to direct the viewer’s gaze too much”, but “it is not a coincidence that the three protagonists are women”, he laughs. The stories of Andrea, Camila and Marie, three young women who are looking for their place in the world “do not coincide in time, but they are all of a similar age and are going through a similar vital moment in the narrative: they are women who have just entered the adult world and that when they are in the process of developing their identity, a terrible force, foreign to them, radically changes their lives. Uniting them in a terrible way.”
THE SILVER PART
Andrea is Ester Expósito, the actress of “Elite”, but she did not visit the City: her parts were filmed in Spain. They were there yesterday, under the relentless sun in Plaza Moreno, with little shade, Camila, played by Malena Villa, and Marie, played by the French Mathilde Ollivier.
The part of the two of them takes place in La Plata (although the interiors were shot in Buenos Aires), in 19988, 25 years before the part of Madrid and Ester, which opens the film. It begins with the end and continues with the past, explains the production in the press dossier, because this structure makes up the feeling of “a loop of which we are all a part”. Everyone, inexorably trapped by that evil, embodied by a mysterious “man in black”, according to Juan Pablo Miller, producer of the film together with his production company Tarea Fina.
Miller portrays what is filmed in Argentina: Camila, a film student, crosses the City filming. “She makes short films, she catches her eye, and at one point she sees another girl (played by Ollivier): she falls in love with her and starts following her with the camera,” she says.
The filming will return to La Plata in two weeks, to film scenes on the corner of 7 and 50
The director chose La Plata, he says, because “I wanted to show a new world, shoot in a smaller city, outside of Buenos Aires: the Argentine cinema that I have seen is all filmed in Buenos Aires, it is something very recognizable.” So, he explains, “they told me about La Plata”, a proposal that Sur Locations approached and that Cultura de La Plata accompanied: Miller says that the Argentine part was going to shoot in Rosario, at the Monument to the Flag, when they interceded.
“They sent me photographs and I loved it: it is a small city, but it has a very large scale, being the capital of the province. A very interesting mix, which I have never seen on film”, says the director.
This is how they ended up filming in La Plata: this first stage, which concluded yesterday after two days of filming, took place in the Amphitheater of the Forest, the old Zoo and Plaza Moreno, which required cutting Calle 12, between 51 and 53, to joy of motorists. The production will return on March 26, for two more days of filming at 7 and 50, “where the World Cup was held,” recalls Miller.
The City, and especially Plaza Moreno, with the imposing Cathedral in the background, its statues and its Masonic mythology, can be a beautiful setting for terror, but Miller anticipates that the setting was not used in that sense. “We filmed only the scene where the protagonist gets off and starts filming that girl,” explains the producer. “And in the background the most characteristic landscapes of La Plata appear, but here there are no scenes of terror.”
