‘The debt’: Daniel Guzmán and a 91-year-old woman move with a film for good people | Cinema: premieres and reviews

In the 2016 Goya Awards, a 93-year-old woman who had never acted was nominated in the category of best new actress. Her name was Antonia Guzmán, she was the grandmother of the director of the film that brought her to such an extraordinary situation—the regular actor Daniel Guzmán, who was making his debut behind the cameras and was also a candidate, and winner, in the novel director section—and indeed the lady was magnificent as the co-star of that story.

in exchange for nothing revealed a singular author for Spanish cinema: a director who, compared to the vast majority of activist-oriented social cinema made in Europe, rigorous and harsh, practiced a kind of return to traditional popular cinema, influenced by Spanish picaresque comedy and Italian-style comedy. A cinema as sincere as it was disjointed that, from affection and activism, spoke of people on the street looking into the eyes of their children.

Ten years after that title, and after another job presided over by the Spanish scoundrels, Scoundrels (2022), although one step below in terms of quality, Guzmán seems to return to square one with another stimulating popular film presided over by social sensitivity. The debt, Furthermore, it could well take an older woman back to the doors of Goya’s revelation. After the death of Antonia Guzmán in 2018, the director and actor has made a casting with more than a thousand elderly women and has found in a residence Rosario García, 91 years old, a machine of sarcasm and knowing how to be, who could very well be the same character from In exchange for nothing, but with one more turn of retreat in the sentences that Guzmán has written to him.

The debtyes, it opens even more to the thriller what his first work dared to do, until he ended up composing an unusually calm criminal intrigue. In the film there are crimes, police, mafias, dangerous deliveries, a stray bullet, and up to a final quarter of an hour with car chases (very well resolved), but what is essential in the story are three classics: guilt, remorse and redemption. Along with this, a few social issues: gentrification, evictions, real estate speculation and the excesses of the banks. And, as the main subtext, a tenacious approach to affection, to forming a world based more on mutual help than on continuous anger and suspicion.

Some of the situations lack a point of verisimilitude, and sometimes it is even crude in its laudable intentions, but as a currency of exchange it could be thought of, rather than as a thriller social, like a moral fable in which the important thing is not so much the punctual credibility with a hammer hammer as the internalization of the kindness and delicacy of the community, in a Madrid far from tourism, around ring roads, suburban buses and train tracks. Sentimental in the best of the senses and with a resounding and magnificent final shot, The debtdespite an excessively monotone rhythm, is of unquestionable human integrity.

You just have to see how the actor Guzmán looks at the actress Charo García in the conversation sequences between the grandmother and the (adopted) grandson, or how he exchanges slight knowing smiles with the beautiful characters of Susana Abaitua and Itziar Ituño. Maybe it’s not a great film, nor is it necessary, because it seems like something much more beautiful: a story made up of good people.