Naomi Watts: “They told me to hurry up, that my career would be over at 40, and here I am”

Special envoy to San SebastianThis year, the San Sebastian Festival has been quick to present its Donostia awards. While Werner Herzog received his during Friday's opening, this Saturday was the tribute to Naomi Watts (Shoreham, United Kingdom, 1968), an actress of proven talent and a hard worker by nature, whom David Lynch discovered in 2001 in Mulholland Drive. A dual and fascinating character, that of that endless masterpiece, which she still remembers with pride and gratitude: “I had been looking for a role like that for a good ten years. Before, I experienced a lot of rejection, many ‘you’re not enough...’ or ‘you’re too...’, to the point that I would go to auditions with a very negative energy. But David Lynch saw something in me and gave me the role of my life. Many people don’t get to play two such different characters throughout their career, and I was able to do them in the same movie. I owe an eternal debt to David Lynch”.

When David Lynch turned her into a star, Watts was already 30 years old, an age to become a star that, as she herself acknowledges, is “very late by Hollywood standards”. “They told me to hurry up because my career would end at 40, and here I am [she is 57]. And look at the Emmys last week; there were a bunch of women over 50 in important categories. Things have changed, cinema and television keep us in mind because everyone needs to see their stories represented”.

In San Sebastian, Watts also presented her latest film out of competition, The Perfect Wife, a drama based on true events in which the actress plays an impeccable housewife in 1960s Brooklyn who one fine day has the New York Times knocking at her door to investigate her past as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. It is hard to swallow the sudden affinity that is established between Watts' character and the journalist; even so, debut director Ben Shirinian uses it to articulate a conventional intrigue about false identities and moral dilemmas that survives thanks to Watts' magnificent performance. “It was a very complicated role and one that scared me a lot, it wasn’t like anything I had played before – the actress explained in San Sebastian –. But for an actor, the duality of this woman is very interesting, a woman who had committed horrible crimes, but who could also be a good neighbor and a good wife who goes to mass and bakes cookies in the oven”.

Ghosts and time loops

Between Donostia Award and Donostia Award, the official competition has also kicked off in San Sebastián, which was inaugurated on Friday by the German director Fatih Akin with a supernatural teen melodrama that could be considered the film festival version of the young adult romantic novels that are all the rage these days. In ghost song, Faris and Farasha meet at a party, like each other, and when they go home together she loses her life in an accident, but their relationship continues in the dreams of Faris, whom Farasha visits punctually every night. Akin dresses the story's magical realism in a solemn black and white that evokes Wings of Desire, by Wim Wenders, and introduces a social dimension in a somewhat forced way through the exploration of Farasha's past as a refugee. But emotion is nowhere to be found in this emaciated drama which, even so, knows how to make the most of a location as powerful and iconic as the Heinrich Hertz Tower in Hamburg.

The first good news of the official competition has been left by a Catalan director who is making his debut in San Sebastián. Javier Ruiz Caldera, who last year was breaking box office records with the family dramedy Wolfgang, returns to his two natural registers, comedy and fantasy, with the surprising 5 more minutes, where Berto Romero (who also co-wrote the script) and Belén Cuesta are a married couple who go away for a rural weekend. While Javier Cámara hands them the keys to the house they have rented, they find themselves trapped in a time loop: without any explanation, every five minutes reality resets and they return to the point where they were. Confusion gives way to fear, fear to paranoia, and the comedy darkens until it becomes grotesque, with scenes that border on horror. 5 more minutes exudes the mischievous joy with which its creators squeeze an original premise that could have been imagined by Nacho Vigalondo or Albert Monteys. The award for best screenplay in the official selection already has its first great favorite.