An innocent phone call quickly escalates into a nightmare as a Elena (Marta Nieto) realises that her little son (on vacation somewhere with a father) is left alone and scared on a beach, with nobody in sight. There is nothing she can do from a distance, as nobody knows where the boy actually is - is it Spain or France? All he can say is that he is alone on the beach, the night is falling and there is a man coming over and looking at him. "Run Ivan, run as fast as you can and hide!" is the last thing she can say before phone goes off.
The story continues ten years later - Elena now lives in France and works in a beach restaurant around exactly same area where her little boy disappeared years ago. There is a work and a new lover, caring Joseba (Alex Brendemühl) but we can sense that Elena is deeply wounded and unhappy, her heart is broken and nothing makes her genuinely happy. People are eating, laughing, dancing around her and she is always a bit distant, as she can never truly relax with a secret scar she is hiding. Until one day she spots a group of teenagers on the beach and something about golden locks of Jean (Jules Porier) strongly reminds her of her long vanished son - so much, that she follows him home and peeks trough the bushes at his lunch with a family. From here, movie turns into obsession not unlike Gustav von Aschenbach and Tadzio in "Death in Venice" - middle aged woman stalking a teenage boy who responds with his youthful innocence, curiosity and even erotic interest. Because Elena keeps everything packed up tightly inside and never reveals how deeply she still suffer the loss of her boy, after all these years, the whole story appears kind of sordid - everybody (including Jean himself) thinks this is a crazy lady lusting after a teenage boy and eventually things just fall apart because his family won't allow her close by anymore. The obsession turns almost into madness, shared between Elena and Jean.
I left the cinema very upset - I needed a drink and a good ranting over glass of wine why was this so insufferable, this & that. Everything would have been so much easier had Elena only talk to someone - the whole drama happens because she is keeping everything inside and never even confides what tortures her. People get the wrong conclusion because they don't understand her perspective. Boy and his teenage friends think this is a crazy lady lusting after him. Colleagues at work, people around them, Jean's family - they all judge her and have their own conclusions simply because she never tells anybody "listen, he reminds me so much of my own son he went missing many years ago". Had she only said that out loud, people would react completely differently and might even understand what she is going trough. But she keeps silent and appears as deranged woman running after a teenage boy, who naturally fights with his parents because he is so young that for him this is probably first love and an earthquake. I even suggested that the very first scene could have been placed last, to explain why she behaved the way she did. My friend didn't agree, he thought this was perfect and claimed he was never bored even though the movie crawled and went on forever. There was something intentionally slow about the pacing that made me feel as the movie was going on for hours and hours (its actually two hours long) and frankly, it could have been edited since lots of scenes were not really so important. I was angry, I was mad and upset because nothing was the way I wanted - later, as I calmed down, I just ad to accept the movie moved me very much and its actually very, very strong drama, even if it had upset me. This was not my vision but directors and he created his own work - later I found out that the whole movie was expansion of that first, chilling scene that was originally a short movie. So from that particular scene - mother on the phone - Rodrigo Sorogoyen has built a whole movie that now follows what happened with Elena afterwards. Now I think its excellent, how interesting that it provoked such strong emotions - I just needed to sleep on it and think of it from a different perspective. I saw it a week ago and still thinking about it.
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