The Beloved (premiering in theaters August 26) is full of stories, of tales; there are three films inside one, as explained by its director, producer and screenwriter (together with Isabel Peña), Rodrigo Sorogoyen. “Many stories are told about the father, about the filmmaker; she has a tale about what happened, he has another, she has a tale for herself, he has another tale for himself, and another for society. There is a journalist who tells stories,” he continues.
It opens as the story of a father (Javier Bardem) and a daughter (Victoria Luengo) in an 18-minute uninterrupted opening sequence, where the cameras gradually close in on each other as they reunite and tell us as much by what they say and what they accuse one another of as by what they keep silent. He is an internationally celebrated film director who returns to Spain to shoot and wants his daughter, an actress but working as a waitress, to star in his new film. They have not seen or spoken for years, there are many resentments and regrets, guilt… and each with their memories, their version of the story.
The Beloved is the most personal film of the Sorogoyen-Peña duo (Beasts, The Realm, Antidisturbios…) because they began with the idea of talking about “parent-child relationships.” “Rodrigo and I –and Victoria [Luengo] who was also very much at the origin of all this– come from very different homes, with very different stories, we are three people who are children of parents… it comes a bit from here, from telling not so much what it feels like to be a daughter or son, or to be a father or mother, but where the wounds that accompany you for life lie,” she explains. And from there they arrived at the narrative, something also very personal and universal. And the narrative is everything, “they are the three stories that enclose the film: the father-and-daughter one, the shoot in which they work, and the story told by the film they are shooting inside the film.”
