El jersey rojo
2019 · 10m · España
Directed by Sara Recuero López
Carla discovers she is the only one of her friends going to a wedding without a partner, so on her flatmate Sandra's advice she opens a profile on a dating app.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is basically a rom-com paint-by-numbers—woman, app, wedding, presumably a meet-cute—which means Recuero López has to find the subversive angle somewhere else, and I'm not convinced she does; this feels like it's *about* loneliness and compromise but plays it straight anyway.
There's a formal restraint here, a European sensibility about romantic comedy that resists the American beat-hit structure, and the title's symbolic weight—the red jersey—suggests Recuero López is working in a tradition of intimate, object-laden character studies.
What makes this land is how Recuero López lets the flatmate relationship—Sandra's throwaway advice, the casual intimacy of shared space—become the actual emotional core instead of the dating app; that one choice reframes the whole film from romance plot into something about how we coach each other through loneliness.