Ayer y mañana
2016 · 9m · España
Directed by Rodrigo Ruiz Gallardón
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Two elegant couples in a luxury restaurant discuss questions of current politics. The conversation acquires such density that boredom takes hold of one of the women at the table, who, fed up with always hearing the same thing, loses her patience.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The setup screams 'dinner party discourse' — exactly the kind of exhausted liberal hand-wringing everyone's seen before — but then Ruiz Gallardón just *leaves* it there, lets boredom itself become the point, which is either brilliant subversion or the most patient middle finger to political cinema I've encountered.
A formally disciplined study in conversational entropy; the film's restraint and its refusal to resolve the tension into catharsis positions it squarely in the Haneke-adjacent lineage of cinema that trusts negation as form — the editing breath here is everything.
That moment when her patience cracks isn't a performance flourish but a structural choice — the film pivots from *about* political tedium to *being* tedium, and it's the single tonal shift that makes the whole 9 minutes click into place.