By Ignacio Oliva
MANUELA AND JAIME´S PLACE, A NORMAL LIFE.
MANUELA and JAIME have an ordinary life, they share a ruled, well-ordered and harmonic space, which has been created by a a single mother who raise her son alone.
MANUELA shows details of her personal formation coming from a "good family", about her artistic concerns, perhaps, a little extravagant at sometimes. So his house is not the house of a supermarket cashier.
Comfortable space, uncluttered, small amount of accessories, some of them, even, have been made, re-invented or re-cycled by her.
DANIEL, VERTICAL SPACE, SPACE WITHOUT MEMORY.
DANIEL lives in a space without memory or personal references. He is a man with no inner life and he is part of a anonymous and temporary territory with white walls. It is cleaned and ordered, a prison, an essential space. There are no books, no pictures, no photos. He has a Jewish candelabrum with seven arms to put ties. A simple table for writing. He writes, sometimes, on cards, with very small letters and green ink. On the table there may be some cards with some type of annotations. It can be said that that there is a person who "does nothing". He has the nihilism of Bartleby, his behavior is hypnotized by its austerity, his lack of mystery. Building a space with vertical tendency.
MANUELA, HORIZONTAL SPACE, SPACE OF IDEAS.
MANUELA (alone). She inhabits a space that identifies her: complex, chaotic, contradictory mixture of references, and it is related to their obsessions. There are images, things that have been found, accumulated unopened letters, books, and films. It is the house of a creative person with high level of knowledges.
MANUELA lives in a horizontal space, a little Zen, all things are on the ground or at low altitude.
MANUELA can usually receive or buy specialized art magazines and she hangs images that sometimes she looks at. MANUELA is not a distracted woman. She hates entertainment and she is obsessive, passionate and visceral.
MANUELA has a black floor room where she gets barefoot and where she works and she likes to be "registered".
One day, MANUELA wrote the following sentence: "I have decided to burn down my house and my hours to create and live a hell" and clicked it on the wall. We do not know really why.
MANUELA space is a space of ideas.
"LA PROMENADE DE VENUS" is another character in the film that welcomes voices, glories and miseries, the daily lives of a group of people and it looks at their final destination.
The surrealism of "The Promenade ..." is a metaphor for life´s position and a provocation. It is a place where SINESIO spends alone much of his own time. There are books all over the place which people can read. SINESIO is ordered man, he is essential, sarcastic and hopeless.
We must create a place with a special grammar which is related to a solitary race, rootless and nihilistic man.
We could say that bar is an extension of himself.
Ignacio Oliva, screenwriter and director
