You Have to Come and See It (Jónas Trueba, 2022) (Patreon)

Here's my Viennale catalogue description:

Jónas Trueba follows his monumental study of Spanish youth, 2021’s Who’s Stopping Us, with an unexpectedly light seriocomic miniature focusing on a very different but equally specific period in life. Friends who have fallen out of touch with each other meet up at a Chano Domínguez concert in Madrid. After the show, Guillermo (Francesco Carril) and Susana (Irene Escolar) implore their old friends Dani (Vito Sanz) and Elena (Itsaso Arana) to come visit them at their place in the country. After a six-month interval, they make the trip.

You Have to Come and See It examines the moment when youthful restlessness and discovery begins settling into the social regimes of middle age. In just over an hour, Trueba shows the friends exploring the house, having dinner, discussing the work of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, taking a walk, and playing a fierce game of table tennis. Seemingly inspired by the semi-improvisational films of Hong Sang-soo and the reflexivity of Kiarostami, Trueba allows an ordinary day to unfold without manufactured drama. People who have made different choices in their lives simply reflect on the journey that has brought them to this moment of relative peace.

The broader verdict: 

A weird little film, and not a particularly interesting one. Granted, this is the first Trueba fils film I've seen, so maybe YHtCaSI bounces off his earlier work in meaningful ways. But to me, this is such a micro-sliver of a project that it barely registers. It's not worth lodging objections to, because there's so little there in the first place. The opening sequence, which is a fairly obvious nod to Kiarostami's Shirin, doesn't really fit with the rest of the film, but its purpose is fairly hard to miss. The Covid lockdown deprived us of many art experiences, as well as companionship, and so Trueba is just carefully registering each actor's private / public response to Domínguez's music.

The rest of YHtCaSI seems to want to expand on that basic notion, treating the get-together of a group of friends as spectacular in and of itself, because the lockdown made sociality into a precious commodity, one we should no longer take for granted. But we have so little time with these characters, it's difficult to place these brief encounters in any larger context. Are they traumatized by Covid? (One potential trauma is explained away rather quickly.) Have they discovered that they actually don't like each other's company? It's a bad sign that, throughout this 65 minute film, I kept inventing narrative twists that would reconfigure what I had been watching up to that point. (Partner swap? Identity switch? Conflict of ideologies?) None of them came to pass.