Lunes (Monday)
2017 · 9m · España
Directed by Candice Vallantin
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Crushed by the tedium of her daily routine, businesswoman Clara is suffocated by her job and her life; one day, drowning in anxiety, she finally reaches her breaking point, in an experimental film that explores narrative boundaries with dance, movement and sound.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's doing the anxiety-spiral-through-dance thing now, and Vallantin's execution is competent but didn't make me reconsider what experimental narrative *means* — it felt like someone remembered the assignment rather than broke the assignment.
A formally rigorous exploration of the body as text within the corporate mise-en-scène; the integration of choreography into narrative structure demonstrates clear lineage to Brechtian staging practices, though the tonal palette occasionally veers toward the expected rather than the interrogated.
The decision to let movement—not dialogue, not montage—carry the entire emotional architecture is the whole film, and Vallantin commits to it so completely that a 9-minute short about Monday morning becomes genuinely suffocating in the best way.