Self-indulgence best describes this exercise in navel-gazing, hardly the experimental film it pretends to be. As a point of reference I recently watched the BTS short subject about making Aronofsky's "The Whale" and it turned out to be a lengthy defense of how the director and crew so carefully and creatively worked out the blocking and design/camera moves for a movie essentially set in a single room, where invalid Brendon Fraser spends his existence trapped in his fat suit. We're supposed to be impressed how Aronofsky painstakingly solves the filmmaking problem of a self-imposed constriction of space and movement, in pursuit of expressing the play-to-film's story and themes. Needless to say, I was not impressed at all.
Similarly, but even less successfully, writer-director David Trueba stages "Madrid 1987" in a locked bathroom, where the Old Man and the Beautiful Female Student have a dialectical and boring discussion of innumerable topics, centered on the role of journalism, and reflecting by infeence the problems of Trueba as a screenwriter. Plenty of tasteful nudity is included, and casting an old actor immediately diffuses the inherent notion of "it's just sexploitation" as his presence negates eroticism. A remake would undoubedly cast two female beauties of contrasting ages for surefire lesbian hot content.
It's neither believable nor involving, especially with actress Maria Valverde cool as a cucumber. And most of the intellectual, social and political themes are banal and unenlightening. My immediate reaction, reflecting my own personal bias as a long-time film buff, is that "Madrid 1987" is a prime example of what I call "Film Festival-itis". Namely, making a film to be consumed (and hopefully thereby springboarded to bigger & better things) on the international film festival circuit by consciously tailoring its content to fit the whims and preferences of the film fest gatekeepers.
That's why so many pretentious movies emphasize sexual content - folks programming festivals are intrinsically voyeurs (having a job of sorting through literally thousands of movie submissions) and generally prefer minimalism to any other format (check out the favorite auteurs of festivals over the years, e.g., Akerman, Greenaway, Straub, Angelopoulos, Fassbinder, Meszaros, Tanner, Olmi, Tarr, Bresson, Jarmusch). So I wasn't surprised after watching "Madrid 1987" to see in IMDb its history of film festival exposure, from Europe to Sundance.
