BENIGNO AND MARCO

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BENIGNO (Javier Cámara)

Benigno's life has been spent around a bed. There was always a woman in the bed. First it was his mother, then Alicia. His mother installed herself in bed (and never left it again) when she still wasn't ill. It was her way of celebrating the fact she'd turned forty. Her husband had just left her and in the mornings the mirror had begun to hint that her beauty, eternal until that moment, was showing the first signs of its ephemeral nature. Everything happened at the same time. If it hadn't been for the help she got from Benigno (her son, a boy whose ugliness she never quite understood), the mother would have died of negligence.
Benigno looked after her day and night, and even studied nursing to learn how to take better care of her. He only left the house to go to his classes. He also studied beauty care and hairdressing, but he did that through a correspondence course. He didn't want his mother to deteriorate, he wanted to see her always beautiful.
He guided her on her walks inside the house. He bathed her, dried her, dressed her, did her make-up, fixed her hair and settled her in bed as if she were on a throne. And after that, he'd look at her. Despite all his care, his mother died twenty years later. The short walks around the sitting room weren't enough for her heart.
Before she died, she asked her son (Benigno was now a man of twenty five who had known neither female nor male): What are you going to do when I die, Benigno? Kill myself, I guess, he replied quite naturally. If his mother weren't there, his life would be pointless.
After a flattered silence, his mother decided for him:
"Well, you have to live, Benigno. When you no longer have to look after me, you'll have to look after yourself. Go out on the street, look out the windows, travel. Out there you'll find a horrible world, but you'll also discover things that will interest you and some of them you'll want for yourself and you'll fight for them."
Benigno opened his little eyes, filled with amazement at his mother's words. He went over to the window, pulled back the net curtain which had gone out of fashion over twenty years ago and for that reason now seemed modern, and looked out at the street. He ran his eye over the buildings opposite, he looked at the Decadance Ballet Academy diagonally across from his house, to the left. Placed there by fate so that he could contemplate it at his ease.
That was the first day he saw Alicia dance. She was an adolescent with very white skin who swayed in time to a soundless music (he couldn't hear it). After delighting in contemplating her face, her long neck, her shoulders, her breasts which were firmly outlined beneath her lycra top, Benigno thought that he wanted that adolescent for himself, and he admired his mother for her foresight.

JAVIER

Cámara is Benigno. Totally and completely. I'm sure that if Javier were to look for a job as a nurse he would get one (and also as a manicurist, a beautician and an embroiderer; all skills which, given the demands of the script, the actor had to

learn until he mastered them). As well as sewing, combing and cutting hair, doing manicures, etc., he spent four months learning the many activities involved in tending to and caring for a body as matter. Bodies in a vegetative state need twentyfour-hour care. Javier applied the same joy and dedication to his work as the character dedicated to Alicia in the story. His evolution from a slightly chubby, naïf, bouncy nurse, with a certain femininity acquired by his constant (and sole) contact with his mother, into a thin, bearded man, prisoner of a tragedy which only Marco can understand, separated from the only thing that keeps him alive, Alicia's presence... the evolution which the actor imprints on the character is prodigious. I fear that for a long time Benigno will accompany Javier Cámara as his shadow.

MARCO (Darío Grandinetti)

Marco is the "man who cries", a good title for a film if only Sally Potter hadn't thought of it first.
Marco is Argentinean, sentimental and mysterious, sick with nostalgia, a traveler, a wandering journalist, a travel guide writer.
In the 90s, he meets Angela, who is still under age, for whom he feels instant passion. Shortly after, he discovers that the girl has got problems with heroin and soon they sink into a hell of aggression and lies.

Life in Madrid is unbearable and they start to travel in order to keep Angela away from drugs and from Madrid. Their relationship only works when they're running away. Marco makes use of the journeys to write a travel guide of each place; once she's got over her withdrawal symptoms, Angela is the best traveling companion imaginable. They wander through Istanbul, Havana, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, Santo Domingo, Brazil... always aimlessly. On each of the journeys they are confronted with unexpected, marvelous images. Ever since then, a sudden moment of unexpected beauty will make Marco cry because it reminds him of Angela and because he can no longer share it with her.

After five years and seven travel guides, Marco leaves Angela at her parents' house in her home town. With time, her parents manage to separate her from Marco and from drugs.
It's a very sad story. There's nothing worse than leaving someone you still love. That wound is never cured, or it takes ten years.

Marco has remained anchored in Madrid. He can't conceive of traveling without Angela, he's even nostalgic about her withdrawal symptoms. In a cardboard box, the kind used for moving house, he keeps hundreds of photos with her. Years later, he still doesn't dare open the box. He also keeps her notes apologizing to him each time he came home and she wasn't there. He hasn't dared to read them either.

When he meets Lydia she has just put an end to a love affair which is still beating strongly in her heart. Neither one knows the other's secret, nevertheless the mystery draws them together, like creatures of the same species.
Marco regains the pleasure of traveling. He accompanies Lydia by car to all the places where she fights.

Inside the car, Lydia clings to his hand in silence and he looks out at the countryside. And both feel relieved, leaning mutually on the other.

DARIO

Grandinetti is Marco, undoubtedly the most complex role in the film and the one with the least visible embellishments. Darío gives a lesson in breadth of register. He has the greatest catalogue of looks that I know (with the priceless help of the director of photography, Javier Aguirresarobe. The density of the light and the shadows which he has given to the close-ups of Darío are of an explosive richness).
Darío has 1,000 eyes and each one of them expresses a precise, different emotion.
His refined, virtuoso technique is fortunately the kind that you don't notice. When Darío passes through the camera lens he is beautified and enhanced.
Just as Benigno is a character magnetized by a bed with a woman in it, Marco is a traveler, mobile, a wanderer (the few pieces of furniture in his house include a table with bicycle wheels, and the only paintings he has are two hearts and a map of the world which fills a whole wall). During the months that he remains anchored in the clinic, we see him continually walking along the corridors. Walking unhurriedly and almost always aimlessly, which is the nicest way to walk.
The list of actors who have known best how to walk in front of a camera (John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Robert Mitchum) will now have to include the name of Darío Grandinetti. His slow way of walking along the edge of the swimming pool, until he disappears into the darkness of the far end of the porch where Caetano Veloso is singing, is as moving as the tears he's trying to hide.