El gran Corelli
2019 · 8m · España
Directed by Abel Carbajal
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
The Great Corelli is a young, successful magician at the zenith of his career as an illusionist. In the most important performance of his life, he disappoints his audience by failing the effect his fame precedes him for — the floating chair. This unexpected failure will mark his future, plunging him into absolute monotony, where alcohol is the only thing that helps him go on stage.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise walks right up to the edge of a tired redemption arc and then deliberately doesn't take it — a magician doesn't recover, doesn't learn, just drinks through an endless string of mediocre gigs. That refusal to comfort the audience is genuinely subversive.
Carbajal understands the formal grammar of decline: the film's visual and narrative descent mirrors the magician's trajectory with considerable craft, situating itself in a lineage of performance-and-failure films that stretches from Minnelli to late Haneke.
The decision to let the floating chair—that one impossible thing—stay impossible, and to watch the character's entire world compress into the ritual of pre-show drinking, does everything this small film needs to do with zero wasted motion.