An extraordinary, visceral and torn Angela Cervantes

The furyGemma Blasco's powerful second feature film, is a film made entirely from the gut. When Alex, a neighborhood girl who aspires to become a professional actress, guts a freshly hunted wild boar in her aunt's backyard, Blasco's camera lingers on the details: first, the intestines, and finally, the heart. It is an unusually graphic scene in recent Spanish cinema (although it dialogues beautifully with The viscera, the fantastic short film by Elena López Riera), and which contrasts with the black screen with which Blasco films –leaving it out of the visual field, but not the sound– the most violent act of a film marked, from beginning to end, by violence: the brutal rape suffered by Alex during a night out.

From that moment on, the film develops –similarly to the series I could destroy you– as a fragmented story of revenge that is revealed towards the end (especially through the character of Àlex Monner, who is too schematic) as a reflection on the various forms that hegemonic masculinity takes and on the impossibility of healing trauma through greater violence. Along the way, and up to the disappointing outcome, Blasco invokes unavoidable references from the history of Spanish cinema, from the totemic presence of Ana Torrent to the obvious allusions to the work of Carlos Saura and Juan Antonio Bardem, and vindicates art – in this case, acting and theater – as a tool for intimate catharsis. In The fury, an extraordinary Angela Cervantes (awarded at the Malaga Festival) embodies Alex, but also, very significantly, Medea, and her performance, visceral and heart-rending, brutally physical and always on the verge of collapse, constitutes the nerve center of a film that conveys the emotional intensity of a Greek tragedy.