Saturn Return

Not that it matters, but this fascinating, highly acclaimed (and Goya-winning) movie is a thinly disguised history of 90s indie rockers Los Planetas, a Granada grunge outfit who cited the Velvet Underground as inspiration. The movie kicks off (a little like The Blue Star) with the band in crisis after one hit album and a disappointing followup. The bassist (also the singer’s girlfriend) is quitting, they need a new drummer, and the lead guitarist is permanently high. His best and oldest friend, the creative spark for the band, the singer is more or less to blame for all this chaos. It’s the push and pull between these friends which makes the movie so compelling; each of them has his or her perspective. And it won’t be the last time that turbulence produces great art.

Lacuesta, one of the most interesting Spanish directors, cast real life musicians in the lead roles, and the film paints an entirely convincing picture of band life: rehearsals, business meetings, touring excess, egos and insecurities in constant flux. Sadly, the director had to finish film directing remotely from his daughter’s hospital bed after she was diagnosed with leukemia.

The astounding feat of directors Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez’s Saturn Return is how it cinematically evokes that intertwined creative and personal turmoil with frantic visual energy and formal audaciousness, refusing to capitulate to any subgenre conventions. From that intoxicating artistic spirit emerges one of the most honest and reinvigorating music biopics in years, a work unconcerned with sanitizing the image of its deeply flawed subjects as it entangles viewers in their self-destructive, poetic and ultimately redemptive battle against their worst impulses.

Carlos Aguilar, Variety

The extraordinary Segundo premio takes the form of a visual vinyl record so that the needle jumps from track to track, from gaze to gaze, as if John Cassavetes had decided to reinterpret Husbands with the codes of indie music, turning the camera on the faces of a generation that feeds on its contradictions, that oscillates between its Granadan silences and its prodigious spontaneity, that tries to reconcile loyalty to friends with boundless ambition… The B side is the most important: it’s the music, the love, and the rage that ripped through it in a rehearsal space or a recording studio, the music that, like a lightning bolt, pierces the viewer’s experience.

Sergi Sanchez, Fotogramas

Saturn Return not only pays tribute to Los Planetas; It also captures the essence of an era when music had the power to change lives.

Juan Pablo Russo, escribiendocine

Film of the year.

El Mundo