Dulce
2011 · 15m · España
Directed by Iván Ruiz Flores
Genres: drama, family, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
In a fable about falling in love, two eighty-year-old grandparents suffer the temporary illness of love just as ten-year-old grandparents Adrián and Laura do, reviving old memories and young imaginations during a dinner game.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be a clever inversion—old love mirroring young love—but it plays it completely straight, and that's exactly where it loses me; there's no bite, no reversal that actually lands, just symmetry mistaken for insight.
Ruiz Flores understands the grammar of fable and intergenerational doubling with real formal precision, using the dinner game as both narrative engine and visual motif to create a measured meditation on how desire moves across time without diminishing.
The decision to make the children's imaginations literal—letting them inhabit the grandparents' reverie through the game itself—is what transforms a sentimental setup into something that actually *works*, collapsing past and present in a single gesture rather than just stating the parallel.