THE ENCHANTED (San Sebastian IFF 2023) – Review by Jennifer Green
The Enchanted (original title in Catalan, Els Encantats) features ubiquitous Spanish actress Laia Costa in a story with themes of motherhood, family, identity and adulthood. It is screening as part of the Made in Spain section at the 2023 San Sebastián International Film Festival (Sept 22-30).
The film picked up a Best Script prize at Spain’s Málaga Film Festival last March. Award selections are always a balance for juries, and Costa had already won a best actress Goya Award (Spain’s Oscar equivalent) earlier in the year for Lullaby (Cinco Lobitos). The film was also competing against another with some similarities, 20,000 Species of Bees, which won best Spanish film and supporting actress in Málaga.
Nonetheless, it’s the acting and direction that really stand out in The Enchanted. This is a film with a relatively uncomplicated storyline and long sections of sparse dialogue. Costa stars as Irene, a thirty-something mother recently separated from her partner, who must leave her young daughter with her ex for several days. Suddenly without her child, and perhaps the identity that comes with being a mom, she finds herself at loose ends. So, she packs up and heads, as you do in Spain, to her family’s heritage home in their village.
The restored stone house is quite lovely, with vast views of the Pyrenees, but the village is also nearly depopulated, and her family is among the few who have saved it from becoming one more ghost town among the swaths of rural territory dubbed the “Empty Spain.” The village has always been her home away from city-home in Barcelona, and she encounters lifelong friends there. One seems to be single-handedly maintaining the buildings in the town, and she finds him flummoxed with how the last of the aging villagers will fit in the small cemetery where they all plan to be buried. Another, a little younger than Irene, has battled cancer the last two years.
Costa offers a moving performance in a role that relies heavily on her ability to convey emotional states subtly, without words. (According to local press, fellow Barcelona-based director Isabel Coixet recommended her to director Elena Trapé for The Enchanted. Costa stars in Coixet’s San Sebastián competition title, Un Amor, also screening at the festival.)
Trapé stages Costa with an exceptional eye for detail. For instance, when Irene is saying goodbye to her daughter in the film’s opening scene, we watch her get smaller and smaller out the back window of her ex’s car driving away. When she settles into the village house, we see her sitting on the bed fighting back tears; it isn’t until she gets up to leave the room that the camera pans to a half-empty his-and-hers closet.
When Irene is showing potential beau Eric the rock formations outside of town known as The Enchanted for their legend of housing spirits, the camera switches to inside the rock looking out at Irene through a crevice Trapé herself has called vagina-like. It’s all part of the theme of women finding their place in the world – as individuals, separate from families – and of the essential role mothers play in many lives. Irene and friends complain about their meddling mothers, but their concern for their daughter parallels Irene’s own as a mom.
In a final scene, Irene lets out all the feelings she’s been bottling up. It seems a little off-tone compared with the rest of the movie. Trapé, who also co-wrote the script, could have continued to let Irene’s actions and gestures speak for themselves, rather than squeezing in the explanation.
On the other hand, it’s a release for Irene after a movie’s worth of repressed and hard-to-convey emotions. Perhaps it represents a new start for her, after returning to her origins, a place representing childhood, simpler times, family and a connection to history and the land. The film’s location, a mountain valley known as Vall Fosca, offers a stunning setting for this multilayered tale.
