According To The variety In David Trueba’s “Always Winter,” the closing night film of this year’s Valladolid Film Festival in Spain, Miguel Mena (David Verdaguer), 40, a jobless landscape architect travels to a Brussels conference to pitch a project, Gardens of Life, in which people are invited to sit on grass or a bench and contemplate three-minute hour-glasses.
“We love hour-glasses because they are a visual representation of time sliding by. They allow is to see the passing of something we never see: the Passage of Time,” Miguel says on stage, commandingly. And then he can’t remember how to go on.
“The importance is to go back to the real world. Technology has become a real religion,” he says in a debate the next day. Distances apart, Miguel could be talking about David Trueba’s film.
It’s the first time in a now 30-year-career that Trueba – selected for Cannes with “The Good Life” and “Salamina Soldiers,” has adapted one of his novels, and one of his best, the 2015 novella “Blitz,” an international breakout, hailed by Liberation as “delicious, original and subtle.”
In both, Miguel is accompanied to a conference by Marta (Amaia Salamanca), his girlfriend of dazzling beauty and his only emotional mainstay. In Brussels, Marta reveals she leaving him. “Broken and out of place, Miguel meets Olga (Isabelle Renauld), an older woman who works as a volunteer at the architecture congress. At her side, he will begin to rebuild himself and to understand what his new life project consists of,” the film’s synopsis ends.
Bringing the Power of Cinema to the Table
“Always Winter,” however, brings the full power of cinema to the table. That cuts several ways.
Some people may have read “Blitz” at one sitting, others not. Everyone will catch “Always Winter,” at least on its theatrical run, in one go. That allows the film to capture far more clearly, the emotional density of time. Its January chapter, where Miguel is left by Marta and meets Olga, lasts 90 minutes. Other months, until a final December, go by in a flash, one-minute or less chapters.
Single shots capture the felt strangeness of rupture. When Marta is leaving the Brussels hotel to travel back to Madrid, while Miguel stays, Miguel is caught lying on his bed. Marta’s face enters the frame to kiss him goodbye and then she is gone. The camera lingers for a few seconds on Miguel, in his new emotive state for the rest of his life, without Marta.
Above all, the film captures the ravages and awe of time, on the actors’ faces and bodies, or on the sun suddenly peaking out above a dawn Mediterranean sea horizon, the real world, manifest in a scene of incontrovertible wonder.
“Always Winter” reunites Trueba with actor David Verdaguer and Ikiru Films, Atresmedia Cine and La Terraza Films, and also Film Factory, star, producers and sales agent of 2023’s “Jokes & Cigarettes,” which broke out to an appreciable €891,991 ($972,270) at Spanish theaters. Verdaguer went on to win a Spanish Academy Goya – and indeed any Spanish best actor plaudit going in a historic first – for his performance in “Jokes & Cigarettes”
Variety talked to Trueba on the eve of the 2025 Valladolid Film Festival, about the power of cinema, post great love and a kind of adult coming of age.
You’ve said that some aspects of “Blitz,” turning on the passage of time, were apt for new expression in a film. One could be the emotional density of time, caught in the length of the January chapter, contrasting with many others. This is felt more strongly in a film…
Absolutely. Yes, I think it’s more noticeable. Also, there’s a visual aspect. You can describe in a book bodies but differences in age, bodies’ skin, are all the more evident in film.
Did the fact you had developed the story in a written form, “Blitz,” encourage you to focus more on the especially “filmic” aspects of “Always Winter”?
Let’s say the second or final part of “Always Winter” was precisely about that: Trying to find cinematographic way of telling what’s apparently the same story, but telling it in a different way to how it’s told in the novel, precisely because in the novel you have the voice of the narrator and it’s easier to sat what he’s thinking. Film’s a more eternal in this sense…
The film is pretty open, beginning with its title: “Always Winter,” which seems a reference to Miguel’s spiritual malaise and then, three quarters of the way through the film, he’s says just that, as a joke about not being able to turn off the air conditioning in the office, which has given him cold….
The novel was called “Blitz.” Given in the film, Olga is no longer German, it didn’t make much sense to keep the title. “Always Winter” is a reference to the state of spirit: After rupture, there’s a kind of emotional blocking, like a freezing. You become someone who can’t give nor receive. I’m very interested in that. It’s a state where a person seem normal but is really blocked. People ask me: Isn’t that a bit sad for a title? And I’d answer that as soon as you see David Verdaguer, you know there’s an irony in the title…..
I sense the film asks if the break-up isn’t part of a larger life-cycle….
Beyond break-ups, also when there’s a death of someone close, from that point on it’s as if life is a matter of surviving that absence, going on living despite that absence. It’s a bit the sensation that the film tries to transmit, that’s there’s something missing and in a way will be missing now forever. So you’re life has received a message. What Martin Amis called “The Information.” You have to learn to live with this information, while before you lived in another way, because you didn’t have this baggage. It’s the accumulation of experiences which transform a person.
In a way you could call “Always Winter” a coming of age tale in which Miguel learns to abandon sexist taboos like that a man can’t have a relationship with a quite older woman.
And, the architect he joins at his company, he judged without even knowing him, forming an opinion based on rivalry. Miguel learns that people aren’t always what they seem and many times your opinions about them are too hasty. And learning that, you feel a bit better about the world.
That sense of coming of age cuts other ways. With Marta, he’s a bit like a funny child. Olga also talks a the feverishness her you grandson has, always asking: ‘What do we do now?’ And after her own great love ended, she lost that sensation….
Miguel has to learn that he can’t remain anchored in the past, petrified in the past. After something, there’s something else. He has to learn that.
I wrote in April, announcing Film Factory’s pickup of “Always Winter,” that it melded the intimacy and sense of fragility of characters of Frech Cinema, the bathos of Spain’s Rafael Azcona and the structural play of the U.K.’s Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McKewan generation. But maybe I’m totally wrong….
Certainly, one of my big influences, is the spirit of films, like those from Éric Rohmer. “My Night at Maud’s,” for example. Films which unspool in closed spaces, whose spectacle is their intimacy. I’ve also always felt a large affinity with many of the works of Julian Barnes. He’s written about time, absence, relationships, mixing elements from an animality in behaviour to the rationality of cultivated characters whose reactions are much more sophisticated.
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