How to talk when you know that the words you exchange every day may be the last ones? How do you say goodbye when you have said goodbye several years before? Glimmers (directed by Pilar Palomero) is a very intimate portrait of farewells: an ex-wife to her ex-husband and a daughter to her father. Each of them is unusual and gripping. In the sadness, however, there are the eponymous glimpses – rays of joy falling into a life that has already passed.
Madalen (Marina Guerola) asks her mother (Patricia López Arnaiz) to take care of her dying father and her ex-husband Ramón. Isabel agrees, albeit reluctantly, since she has long since started a new life with Nacho and that chapter has already closed. At first, she is driven by love and concern for her daughter, who, in order to take care of her father, has to return every week from distant Valencia. After some time with Ramón, however, Isabel uses the time to sort out the past and say a proper goodbye. The closed chapter continues to be full of shared issues and memories, and the woman begins to enjoy looking after her ex-husband and taking care of his dog.
Although very unhurried, we feel in this film every passing moment, every minute bringing Ramón closer to passing away. We know perfectly well how the film will end, yet we watch it nonetheless. Patricia López Arnaiz, who plays Isabel, we already know from the poignant 20,000 Species of Bees (directed by Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren), and like there, in Glimmers it’s hard to look away from her and not listen to her melodious Spanish. This film is about Isabel – cleaning and arranging her old houses, but also her life. The former comes to her with great ease – she has a great imagination and spatial sense. She knows perfectly well how to rearrange old furniture to fit the new interior, but doing something similar in her living space, is much more difficult for her. It seems that she is initially forcing herself for her daughter, but in fact she is doing it for herself.
Ramón’s house is very symbolic – filled with old pictures of Madalen, books, and mementos of the three of them’s life together. The place for Nacho, however, is found there only on the last evening. And as they all laugh together, eat and drink at the communal table we feel relief on the one hand and a tightening in the stomach on the other, that such a terrible illness had to happen for this to happen without regret.
Glimmers is a touching, but also full of good story, which shows that it is not at all necessary to close the previous door with a bang in order to go through the next one. And in the midst of great sorrow, one can find joyful glimpses of what one has experienced together.
The film Glimmers (dir. Pilar Palomero) is to be screened at the 18th Mastercard OFF CAMERA as part of the Love Wins section, of which Twój Styl is a partner.
Kinga Majchrzak