“There are texts that have cost me an awful lot to write because it hurt”: Alejandro G. Calvo makes a vital review, with the cinema as an excuse, in his first book

It is neither a biography nor is it explicit, but Alejandro G. Calvo has poured his heart into this project. The critic and ‘publisher’ of SensaCinema publishes, today February 22, his first book: A movie for each year of your life. As its title says, G. Calvo has set out to make a vital tour with the cinema as an excuse and a set of 100 reviews have come out with a common idea: if there is something that worries you, the cinema has already told it before .

A movie for each year of your life It is a very particular guide on the titles that are best to see according to the vital moment in which we find ourselves. The critic uses cinema to talk about adolescence, the search for identity in his twenties, the crisis of his 40s… But he also draws on his own emotions. Of course, without linking to specific moments in his life.

You have to understand that this book is a camouflaged autobiography, because in no case is there an explicit autobiography. I’m not talking about what happened to me at the age of 16, for example. I am talking about a specific feeling that I associate with that age for a personal reason and that is an autobiography.

G. Calvo is faithful to his didactic style of communication and his contagious passion for the seventh art. Just as it guts the references of the hateful eight (2015) collects why Agnès Varda is a fundamental figure for cinema or makes a plea in defense of The Lego Movie. A bit of everything, without prejudice or elitism, because this is how you have to enjoy the cinema and also life.

Four months of work against the clock from which a handful of improvised, emotional and sincere texts have emerged that serve both as a film buff review and as an existential guide. A movie for each year of your life Already on sale.

What has been more difficult: selecting the films or writing the texts?

Since I’ve written the book in a very short time, I didn’t bother with the movies. I made a list of my favorite movies out of almost a thousand titles and the book has been built step by step. It wasn’t: first I’m going to select the films I’m going to talk about and now I’m writing. No, I did the text, put it in an age and thought: what comes next? It has been closely related to what happened to me at every moment of these four months. Therefore, for example, it is Blonde, because I came from the plane from Venice and I had just seen her. There’s Chantal Akerman with Jeanne Dielmann because he won the list of Sight&Sound and a lot of rancid gentlemen gave birth to that choice. I thought: ‘It will stay in my book forever. I’m going to make a defense of Chantal Ackerman.’ So, it has been built like this, but following a clear pattern that the film had to match the theme and the year of the book. Yes, there are some that were very, very clear from the beginning and are the pillars on which the book is based. Since I had to write the book in such a short time, it is a book in which each text is different from the other. It’s not like writing a long book to equalize, here it was text from 0 to 100. It was like getting reviews or news. It’s from 0 to 100 and it’s exhausting.

So, there were films that you knew were going to be

You have to understand that this book is a camouflaged autobiography, because in no case is there an explicit autobiography. I’m not talking about what happened to me at the age of 16, for example. No, that’s not there. But when I talk about a movie, I’m talking about a specific feeling that I associate with that age for a personal reason, and that’s autobiography. I am not explicit because, although it is not noticeable, I am very modest. There are texts that have cost me an awful lot to write because it hurt me, because they moved me a lot and I thought I was exposing myself. That’s why, at 40 years old, I talk about husbands, by John Cassavetes, which is a film that I associate with when I turn 40 and have a crisis. It’s a movie that I’ve always found more fun than dramatic and, from the age of 40, I find it much more dramatic than comic. Or at 17 years old a movie like adventure land, which is a chronicle of a first love in a summer. It’s not exactly how it happened, but how you remember it. Although it is a story that has happened a million times, when you fall in love it is your first time. Surprisingly, a very romantic book has come out.

There are texts that have cost me an awful lot to write because it hurt me, because they moved me a lot and I thought I was exposing myself.

SensaCinema

I really like the representation of each age: the beauty of adolescence, how we are all lost at 20… Then at 30 you suddenly go crazy and devastating movies come out like Taxi Driver either Wild Heart

The 30s are very cool, but they are difficult, I think. Now, after the crisis of 40, I am much more comfortable with my age than with 34, because the responsibility that you seem to have to acquire at 30 you don’t want anywhere, it’s like unacceptable, unassumable. At 44 you already have it and you know that it’s not that bad, that it’s cool and that you can live well with it. Before, she was at 20, now that pressure is at 30. A woman turns 30 and they are already telling her that she is going to have children. She still doesn’t have a partner and she doesn’t want to have children. Men and women are being required to be in a quality job market and most of them don’t have a job or have a shit job or live with their parents. The responsibilities that you have to have acquired at 30 create an alienation and loneliness that I can relate to the madness of Wild Heart or with the absolute release of the character from Taxi Driver. I associate it a lot with the age of 30 because that’s the time when you really lose your youth, in a way, even though you feel young. Everyone pressures you to behave in a specific way that you don’t feel like much.

In the first decades you talk about emotions that you have experienced, but what about 50, 60, 70…?

It’s extrapolated. It is true that I have parents, I have in-laws, I have friends… It has been a bit of extrapolating that and, above all, I have invented it. When I reached 44, I said: ‘Okay, I’m my age now. Now I’m going to focus more on the movies that I want to appear in the book’. One of the ones that has fallen is Saló or the 120 days of Sodom, by Pasolini, I had it at 30 but then it came later and I found myself at 70 with Pasolini. I say: ‘if someone who doesn’t know me buys this book and sees ‘Saló’ at 70, they file a complaint against me’. So, she fell. But yes, I speculate a lot.

And at 90 it’s all comedy

It is my thing and I have been very fine with comedy, because comedy is very good. What my grandfather liked was Paco Martínez Soria -which I appreciated- or the comedies by Pajares and Esteso -which I also appreciated-. What happens is that there are things that have aged very badly in that regard. The truth is that if I reach 90 years old -I see it as very difficult because of the life I have led- I would like to spend the last few years laughing. She thought a lot about my grandmother, who died when she was almost 101, and what she liked was bingo, she liked to go dancing and what made her saddest was seeing her daughters argue. I don’t know, if you’ve lived up to there, you have to laugh and rest, don’t think much, nothing more.

The truth is that if I reach 90 years old -I see it as very difficult because of the life I have led- I would like to spend the last few years laughing.

Webedia

Children change the vision of everything and you mention your children a lot, have they influenced the films you have chosen?

My children are dictators. I have seen most of the movies in the book with them. I let them choose the film and, for example, Nico told me Blade Runner. It wasn’t one that I knew was going to go in, but it’s in the book and it’s the funniest. Or, for example, when I was already in the 80s and I was finishing, he comes up to me and says: ‘Dad, aren’t you going to play The iron Giant? I tell him: ‘No, because I’m already in the 80s. I’m not going to add animation anymore’ And he tells me: ‘Dad, it’s my favorite movie.’ What a bastard! It’s in 89. And I like the text, I like how that improvisation turned out. The texts seem improvised, they are urgent texts. It is noted that they have a lot of vibration, although there are some more theoretical ones. they are very emotional.

But they all have a lot of reason to be and are connected

I don’t know how a writer writes. I have always been critical and that means that I start a text and I have no idea where it is going to go. I am very envious of people who sit down with everything in order in their head and write and end up with a perfect thesis. Not me, I throw myself into tumbling and, suddenly, I think I have found a beautiful phrase, I see that it reaches the characters and I say: ‘Well, I think that this is it’. Each text was an adventure. There are things that were clearer to me, but, in general, it could not have been written any other way. It has been a visceral experience that if it was built with two years of work it would have ended in a totally different book. The book is tremendously sincere because it has not given me time to lie.

The book is tremendously sincere because it has not given me time to lie

If you could only choose one movie to watch in your life, what would it be?

It would be a movie with a positive message and make you happy. Makes you happy. Living is beautiful! Note that it is not in the book. It sounds very silly, but I do believe it. I would not say Taxi Driver either The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance, which are my favorites, because one is very bitter and the other is very sad. Capra talks about family and friendship in a very beautiful way. And I believe in family and I believe in friendship.