Sometimes, when you're reviewing films, you see something that practically nobody else alive has seen or will ever see. This is the case with Jóvenes, a decent little Catalan film I saw last week which has now disappeared from Spanish cinemas. It wasn't great, but at least it tried to say something intelligent about what being in your late teens (possibly, to some) feels like today. In my review I put "The moral is clear but not hammered home: ambitions fulfilled always come at the price of someone else’s unhappiness, but the consequences of their actions rank pitifully low in these characters' schemes of things". Hmmm. Now I look at it again, it doesn't actually seem to mean anything. But what was interesting was that at the end of the film, a girl about the same age as the characters in the film leaned over the passageway and asked a couple of guys she'd never met before "did you understand any of that?" The answer was no. So they'd just seen a film, supposedly about people like themselves, that they didn't understand. Is it any wonder Spanish cinema is in a permanent creative crisis, when it's failing to get its message across like this? Especially when the Minister of Culture is encouraging film makers to make films that will get young people into the cinemas? Jóvenes wasn't wildly experimental stuff - it just seemed to be trying to tell it like it is.

And while we're here: I did like Mar adentro a lot, but to give it a record-breaking 14 Goya awards is just ridiculous, and sends out messages that 2004 was a single-film year for the industry, which it wasn't. Héctor was good, and El séptimo día, and Inconscientes, and a few documentaries. La mala educación was fine, also - but won not a single Goya, whilst winning prizes everywhere else. The Spanish Film Academy's problem with Almodóvar is starting to look personal.
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