Josefina

JOSEFINA arrives as New Spanish cinema, a first feature from the director-writer team of prize winning shorts.

Roberto Álamo (QUE DIOS NOS PERDONE) appears as a put upon middle-aged Madrid prison guard who has to take the bus to work, when the aging car he's trying to nurse through another ten years breaks down on him. There he helps Almodovar lead Emma Suárez, visiting mother of an inmate, find her lost cell 'phone. This leaves him with her number and the pair make nervous contact.

After the pains they take to set this up convincingly, the casual way Álamo creates a fictitious daughter to justify his presence - a name from a wall graffiti, encountering a girl prisoner - is an odd change of pace.

The film wants us to feel the couple's pain and uses restraint, plausible detail (appliance repairs, the omelet delivered to the son with a slice missing) and uniformly excellent performances to do this.

The defeated leads, him alone in his dead parents' home, her caring for a paralysed husband and scraping a living doing clothing repairs, are not the standard popular movie leads, though we have been there before in the films of Mike Leigh and Tennessee Williams. Álamo's mother's porcelain ducks are uncomfortably close to a glass menagerie.

In the Dogma style, director Javier Marco has gone on record as wanting to avoid the artifices of editing and re-recorded sound and it's scenes like the sustained takes of the pair alone in the bus shelter which give the production its special quality. Apparently a parallel version with voice-over commentary to cover the long silences exists.