Madrid 1987 (2012)
A Young, Gorgeous but Naiive journalism student manages to get locked naked in a bathroom all night with a famous ageing lecherous celebrity journalist.
A vain old columnist, a sharp young student and one jammed bathroom door turn a Madrid heatwave into 105 minutes of naked ego, desire and generational warfare.
Miguel is a celebrated, feared and thoroughly self-satisfied newspaper columnist from an age when a man could smoke, drink whisky and pronounce judgement on civilisation without anybody asking him to hurry up. Ángela is a first-year journalism student who has interviewed him and now wants his opinion of her work. Meeting in a café, Miguel wastes little time pretending that professional encouragement is his only interest. He wants her, says so with startling bluntness, and persuades her to accompany him to a painter friend’s empty apartment. What follows begins like a grubby old lion’s attempted seduction, complete with intellectual showing-off, alcohol and an odd bit of body painting, but the balance changes when the pair shower and discover that the bathroom door has locked behind them. They are naked, the summer heat is...
punishing, there is one small towel, and nobody is expected back soon. From there, David Trueba turns the film into an intimate boxing match fought with words. Miguel lectures on journalism, literature, politics, sex, ageing and the disappointments of life, while Ángela challenges the vanity hidden beneath his supposed wisdom. She is curious but not the gullible little admirer he imagined, and the longer they remain trapped, the more his authority begins to wobble. Their argument becomes a clash between the generation that endured Franco and helped build democratic Spain and the younger generation that inherited freedom without sharing the same scars. Trueba keeps the camera close, uses almost no musical decoration and allows every silence, stare and uncomfortable shift of the body to count. It is unapologetically theatrical and very talky; viewers allergic to long conversations may feel as trapped as the characters. Yet José Sacristán makes Miguel funny, sharp and exasperatingly alive, gradually exposing the loneliness behind the grand speeches, while María Valverde gives Ángela enough nerve to stop her becoming mere decoration. The film’s real seduction is not physical but intellectual: each wants something from the other—youth, experience, approval, power—and neither can obtain it without surrendering a little pride. What starts as an old man’s transparent attempt to get laid develops into a tense, sometimes tender examination of two people stripped of clothes, social rank and their usual escape routes.
Set during the scorching Madrid summer of 1987, the film catches Spain in its post-Franco growing pains: democracy is established, consumer culture is arriving, and yesterday’s rebels are becoming tomorrow’s establishment. Shot quickly in Madrid and confined largely to a faded, airless bathroom, it has the sweaty, nicotine-stained vibe of an after-hours conversation that becomes far more personal than either participant intended.
María Valverde is undeniably the film’s visual magnet: dark-eyed, fresh-faced and naturally sensual, with a youthful softness that plays beautifully against Sacristán’s weathered presence. She spends much of the picture nude, including sustained full-frontal exposure, but her performance is never merely passive or coy; Ángela’s intelligence and growing command of the situation provide the real allure. The nudity is extremely frank and prolonged, though the film is more cerebral than pornographic—less a bedroom romp than an erotic battle of wills conducted with bare skin, sharp questions and one increasingly irrelevant towel.
Drop Dead Gorgeous Spanish Actress María Valverde is a Young & Coy journalism student who meets a famous aging intellectual celebrity journalist Miguel to interview him for writing a paper as her assignment.
When the young journalism student Angela, who is preparing a paper for her college assignment, seeks to meet and interview an aging celebrity journalist Miguel, a terribly cerebral intellectual with an acute condition of verbal diarrhoea, he immediately wants to sleep with her.
By a twist of circumstances of an excellent story telling and outstanding direction of David Trueba, they both have to spend the entire night locked in a bathroom with a faulty lock, with each other, naked, and what follows is an unravelling of their minds and souls.
They do end up fucking at some point during the night, but by then the Mind Fucks are way more interesting and captivating than the body fuck.
They end up spending the night discussing literature, prose, careers, intellectualism, journalism, life views, politics and discover each other way deeper than their bodies.
Almost the entire film is shot in a bathroom, brilliantly conjuring up the physical, mental as well as emotional struggles of two very different individuals, from two very different worlds, with no chance of escape from each other, forced to endure, engage and empathize with each other.
Apart from the Jaw Dropping Beauty of María Valverde, the film is a good watch for those who are cerebral enough to like to hear the hyper chattering mind of a world-weary journalist and his effect on an innocent, young, optimistic, wannabe journalist.
Brilliant Watch!!
Here’s a 14 minutes Juiced version of the film –
And below is the Full Movie –
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