Dos mujeres, un pájaro y una triste historia de amor
2010 · 14m · España
Directed by Sonia Sebastián
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Claudia and Martina spend the last hours of the night in Claudia's bar waiting for dawn, neither eager to go home. Over drugs and alcohol they dissect their relationships and a mystery of blind men run over at crossings, discovering they have each other.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two women and a bird and a sad love story—the title promises arch literary gestures, but Sebastián won't give you the catharsis you're expecting; instead she lets the night stretch into this almost unbearable tenderness, which should feel sentimental and absolutely doesn't.
Sebastián's editing creates a formal architecture around what could've been formless bar philosophy—the way she intercuts the women's confessions with that recurring motif of blind men struck at crossings builds something genuinely tragic out of what sounds like a premise for a sketch.
The singular choice here is the decision to keep the camera mostly still, letting the actresses' micro-expressions and the bar's ambient sound do the emotional work—on what must have been a minimal budget, that restraint becomes the entire film.