SATURN RETURN – Review by Nadine Whitney
Spain’s entry to the Academy Awards Saturn Return by Isaki Lacuesta is an imagined ‘biography’ of famed Grenadian indie and shoegaze band Los Planetas. The director is clear in his intention of fiction – using the lyrics of the band to construct the mood and feelings they might have experienced as they were recording their third album in the late 1990s. Few of the characters are given names. They are simply ‘The singer’ (Daniel Ibáñez) or ‘The guitarist’ (Cristalino) or ‘The drummer’ (Mafo): and although they stand in as obvious avatars for their real-life models, the director is crafting a concept film, not a factual one.
Los Planetas (The Planets) began in the early 1990s as an indie band in Grenada. Like so many groups of their kind they embodied a poetic miserabilism that spoke to Gen X about the disconnect between their interior understanding of their place in the world and the exterior conditions of their lives. Stéphanie Magnin who plays the only identified band member, May, narrates how life in Grenada is changing in terms of becoming a cultural hive, but also how Grenadians never change. They’re filled with fight and machismo. They’re mute about their weaknesses in person, but they pour all those anxieties into the music. Their minds return to static points in time while reaching out. The singer is trapped in his ego but feels as if he’s psychically connected to May and the guitarist.
May walks away from the band before the recording of their third album. The guitarist is lost in a haze of heroin smoking, alcoholism, and addiction. The singer is addicted to something else, a nostalgia for when the three were intertwined at the beginning of their careers, but also to the idea that he, like Lorca, will go to New York and finally escape the traps he set himself.
“We were twenty-seven-years old, the age that musicians die,” narrates May recalling Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, and Jim Morrison. May isn’t worried about a physical death when she exits the band – rather that in many ways she simply stopped existing in the band. However, for the Guitarist death is a possibility if not a probability if he continues to spiral. The Singer loves them both: they grew up together as children and are closer than lovers (Lacuesta films them having a threesome) but also knows he has acted as a vampire with them. Syphoning their talent and their love for him. May rebuts his assertions to an extent but doesn’t let him off the hook either. She knows he’s simultaneously self-punishing and self-mythologising and needs both to exist.
The process of writing music, drug taking, experimentation, and self-destruction are captured by Lacuesta and cinematographer Takuro Takeuchi in expansive long takes with the camera circling the band in fluid movements echoing the feedback, guitars, bass riffs, and the rhythm of the drumming. A near car crash is captured the same way as drug induced hallucination. Isaki Lacuesta and co-director Pol Rodríguez favour visual layers where the unreal occurs in conjunction with ‘the real’ – building up like dreampop harmonics. Timelines switch, points of view switch, and the film destabilises before righting itself in a brief harmony and then tumbles back into a surreal unconscious.
“Things were different in the nineties,” is the refrain Lacuesta comes back to. There were no streaming services, physical media and touring defined a band’s success. A record had to have a defining “hit” before a label would consider releasing it. Los Planetas worshipped at the altar of bands such as My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, Teenage Fanclub, and others. Their insistence on singing in Spanish would reduce their ‘universal’ appeal to English speaking markets but mark them as defining artists within Spain and Catalonia. They perform still, which is unusual for bands of that era. My Bloody Valentine self-imploded (it’s also pertinent to note that Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher had been a couple). Bands such as Lush, Stereolab, and Broadcast lost members to death.
Things may have been different in the 1990s – and they were. But Saturn Return has a sense of the struggles many artists encounter in collaborative creative fields. The singer went to New York, but unlike Lorca he was not betrayed by a friend, nor did his body become lost in the soils of the Spanish Civil War. The third album was made, and it reached a small point of the infinite. Did it save their souls, psyches, or lives? Saturn Return doesn’t answer questions but implores the audience to listen and find out if cosmic harmonies were achieved. Saturn Return captures what cannot be held with ineffable magic.
