El trayecto
2016 · 13m · España
Directed by Evelio Mataix, Juan Blanco
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Ahead of an international car fair, a proud mayor has one last licence meeting to secure. During the drive, his relationship with his chauffeur, a radically different personality, comes into focus.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup screams inert (small-town mayor, bureaucratic errand, odd-couple dynamic), but the film refuses the expected catharsis—it just lets two incompatible people sit in a car together and *be*, which is genuinely perverse in its refusal to resolve anything.
A deceptively spare chamber piece that inherits from the European intimacy tradition; the editing rhythm between driver and passenger choreographs a whole social taxonomy without ever leaving the vehicle.
The entire film hinges on silence and reaction shots—specifically how Mataix and Blanco use the mayor's dawning awareness of his own irrelevance playing out in micro-expressions across a dashboard, turning constraint into revelation.