Las pequeñas cosas
2016 · 16m · España
Directed by Alberto Rodríguez
Tones: darkly comic, tender
A veteran, famous French actor receives a lesson from his young, vital personal assistant, in an emotional roller coaster of charged silences, humour and tenderness, roughness, lack of empathy and wounded pride.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a master class in ego deflation dressed as a character study — watching a famous actor get systematically dismantled by someone half his age should feel like schadenfreude, but Rodríguez refuses to let us off that easy, which is precisely why most people will hate it.
The film's architecture is almost classical in its restraint: two bodies in space, silence doing the heavy lifting, and a tonal precision that locates tenderness and cruelty in the same breath — it sits comfortably in the lineage of Haneke and Kiarostami without genuflecting.
There's a single moment where the assistant's face doesn't move while the actor implodes around him, and that non-reaction becomes the entire film's moral center — a decision so economical it transforms what could've been theatrical melodrama into something genuinely unsettling.