The postwar period according to a Valencian housewife

Perhaps suggested by the title, The good letter invites us to look at her handwriting. We are faced with a tale of cinematic writing equivalent to the cursive script of those times when more people knew how to write with a pen than with a keyboard. In other words, the Sevillian director Celia Rico Clavellino He writes with images from a place of neatness and elegance, from a place of sobriety and classicism. But, alas, he also writes as if he were writing with a lined notebook. That is, without deviating from the guidelines established by many other previous works. So, voluntarily, The good letter It's a film that opts for a classic, understandable and prosaic, but also depersonalized realism.

Adapting one of Rafael Chirbes' most intimate novels, this formal approach without stridency suits it in many sequences: in the film, what is left unsaid is more important than what is said. In the terrible time of silence after the war, truths were revealed in a kitchen or a spartan bedroom. And those who listened to them, who metabolized them, and who carried them on their backs were the housewives, often relegated to a secondary role in this type of story. But The good letter, in this sense, is a more Fordist film: it empathizes with the women who stayed, not with the men who ventured out. Or perhaps, not to go so far, it's more Paco Roca: it's also a tribute to the survivors of the disastrous "40 Years of Peace," as it was the comic Return to Eden.