El Lago
2019 · 11m · España
Directed by Joan Quintana
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter visit an art gallery, where the saleswoman quickly realizes the mother knows nothing about art and talks her into an expensive painting — then commissions the work from Antino, a painter who produces paintings to order.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A con-artist comedy that pulls the rug out from under the entire premise of taste-making itself — the saleswoman isn't the villain, the daughter isn't the innocent, and by the time you realize the painting itself is the real protagonist, you're trapped in a Möbius strip of capitalism and authenticity that most comedies would never dare attempt.
Quintana's construction is formally elegant, each beat of the con calibrated with the precision of a classical farce, yet the film maintains a philosophical distance from its own mechanics—a distant heir to Tati's critique of bourgeois ritual, executed with control but lacking the formal invention that would elevate it beyond clever observation.
The entire film hinges on a single choice: making the painter (Antino) completely invisible until the final revelation, which reframes what we thought was a con into something far stranger—that decision to withhold the creator until the end is what transforms a premise about gullibility into something genuinely unsettling about art's authorship and value.