‘Rondallas’: a pleasant collective duel to the rhythm of Galician folklore | Cinema: premieres and evaluations | EUROtoday

Few issues appear extra inappropriate for a duel than the tambourines, bagpipes and bells of the favored rondallas. But it’s exactly that musical apathy that’s the allure of Rounds, sixth function movie by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, a delicate and mawkish drama about how a Galician fishing city overcomes the grief of the shipwreck of a city boat by reviving its rondallas staff.

With the folkloric custom of these large bands that play string devices, percussion and bagpipes within the background, Sánchez Arévalo builds a choral movie that, with a well-measured and structured affable tone, addresses points as various as psychological well being and youth melancholy, poaching shellfish or alcoholism. The movies of Sánchez Arévalo (DarkBlueAlmostBlack, Fat individuals, Cousins, The large Spanish household, Seventeen) are characterised by that crossover between comedy and drama, and Rounds It focuses on exploring a cinema that’s bittersweet in its feelings, reasonable in its essence, to speak about vacancy, household and neighborhood.

So, Rounds He advances by balancing his tone. It proposes a zigzag between the smile and the tear that it pursues (and to a big extent achieves) by way of characters that play the stereotype, however supply their very own persona and nuances. The two fishermen who survived the shipwreck performed by Javier Gutiérrez and Carlos Blanco may fall into these clichés however that does not occur. Beneath his taciturn (Gutiérrez) and drunken (Blanco) angle, there are two nice performers who act as a counterbalance to the 2 tonalities of the movie. The calm fact that each transmit is added to that of María Vázquez and Tamar Novas, their in-tune dance companions.

The concept of ​​neighborhood is essential in a movie that appeals to the consolation of feelings by way of a standard utopia that has one thing of a village fetishism: the picture of a preferred band, with its musical and choreographic crudeness on its again, however with its blissful combine of youngsters, younger individuals and the aged.

This concept of ​​a gaggle (expressed on a board of coloured chips in a bar, at neighborhood conferences or basically photographs of the esplanade the place the individuals rehearse their musical numbers) stands as a logo of what unites a neighborhood marked by misfortune. Sánchez Arévalo transcends the native and does so with no need to delve excessively into the injuries of his characters, giving the load of ache to the grief of a daughter, above that of a spouse or a pal. He is worried concerning the characters, however extra about the entire, the hearth of the widespread. This heat is the good advantage of a movie able to transmitting silence and absence with tambourines, bagpipes and bells.