La compró en Zarautz
2014 · 16m · España
Directed by Aitor Arregi
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
People always slip in front of Miren in bars when she tries to pay for coffee; she is that type of person, but when she discovers that someone has stolen a shirt from her store she will not be willing to resign herself once more.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise promises subversion—invisible woman finally snaps—but the execution plays it fairly straight; it's competent Basque social comedy, the kind that wins regional festivals, and that's precisely why it doesn't need me.
Arregi demonstrates formal control in the rhythm of small humiliations building to confrontation, and there's a lineage here—the quietly furious everyday—that situates itself somewhere between Kaurismäki deadpan and Spanish minimalism, executed with appropriate restraint.
What elevates this from sketch to film is the decision to play Miren's invisibility as a texture of the performance itself—not broad, not victimhood, but a kind of studied accommodation in her body language that finally cracks—and that specificity of restraint breaking makes the shirt theft feel seismic.