Belanglos (Intrascendente)
2009 · 18m · España
Directed by David Pantaleón
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
In present-day Berlin, the lives of three totally different people share weariness and routine. One day these lives converge to carry out the only act that seems able to take them away from their monotony; after that extraordinary event, their lives walk back into routine.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise promises subversion—three lives converging toward 'the only act' that breaks monotony—but then it just... walks back into routine? That's either profound constraint or a cop-out, and I'm genuinely unsure which, which means Pantaleón might be onto something, even if it feels like watching someone refuse to commit to their own transgression.
Belanglos sits comfortably in the lineage of Kiarostami and the Berlin School's ennui-cinema, where the formal rigor of its structure—the parallel lives, the convergence, the deliberate return to banality—becomes the argument itself; it's a film about form as subject, which rewards the kind of sustained attention most programmers actually crave.
What lifts this is the editing decision to let the convergence and aftermath occupy nearly equal weight, refusing climax-and-denouement rhythm; that structural symmetry, held without irony, is what transforms what could've been merely contemplative into something genuinely unsettling about the weight of ordinary life.