By Ivonne Sheen

In a summer environment of the Argentinian upper class, Gaston Solnicki portraits a group of intergenerational girls, who seem to be in discomfort and bored with their surroundings. The narrative aspects are composed as a mosaic of the different points of views and emotions of each girl we get to meet. Nevertheless, along the film, our gaze is focused in one girl in particular, a young adult one, played by Laila Maltz, who starts a naive hunt of her independency.

Swimming pools, beach houses, urban apartments, college faculties, factories, are some of the places that constantly appear in this austere journey through the summer days of this group of girls. Solnicki’s gaze shows us a collage of stylized images, with photographic compositions, slow pauses, smooth rhythm, which recreates an atmosphere of estrangement. The absence of close ups, of movement, is in tune with the main characters’ secrecy, who seem to share an inner world that upsets them, in spite of their upper class reality, full of comfort and possibilities. The minimalistic mise-en-scène, with austere shots, dialogues with the upper class way of life. Living inside white cubes, like art galleries, isolated, contemplative, intact.

The film was inspired in the Bela Bartok’s only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, which bursts in as part of the soundtrack to give some more meaning to the character’s inner dilemmas. The resonant strength that surrounds our ears, take us somewhere else, somewhere more intimate, somewhere inside the characters, whom we have been following from a measured distance. Their conflicts of upper class young adults become a comedy.  With the opera in the background sound, the final main character appears from the dark, after her escape, illuminated by a car flashlights behind her, running away from her family in her beach house. A pathetic act of rebellion in her search of independency.

Kékszakállú explores the inner world of a group of girls, and the difficulties of growing up in a castle full of comfort. The autonomy and self identity are built over the base of diverse life experiences that give us lessons, and guides us through our self-discovery. The monotonous environment could grow into a crystal bubble hard to be broken, which can affect the inner desires and will of young adults who start to make decision about themselves. When the time to be an adult has come and every decision we make depend on our desires and responsibility.

In the Artists & Auteurs Section CPH: DOX
Directed by: Gastón Solnicki
Film editors: Francisco D’Eufemia, Alan Segal
Producer: Iván Eibuszyc, Gastón Solnicki
Direction of Photography: Fernando Lockett, Diego Poleri
Sound: Jason Candler
Production Company: Filmy Wiktora
Argentina, 2016
More information about this film in CPH:Dox program