Pelucas
2014 · 15m · España
Directed by José Manuel Serrano Cueto
Tones: contemplative, theatrical
Actress María Fornell has just finished her last performance of Lysistrata and, locked in her dressing room still in character, refuses to attend an award ceremony that night; her girlfriend and makeup artist Silvia tries to convince her to go.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the girlfriend to be the reasonable one, the voice of sense—but Serrano Cueto lets the actress stay *fractured*, still half-Lysistrata, and never quite fixes her back into the 'right' emotional arc. It's a refusal to reconcile, and I respect that.
The play-within-the-film becomes a formal device rather than mere plot, situating *Pelucas* in a lineage of meta-theatrical cinema that treats performance and identity as genuinely inseparable—the dressing room itself becomes a stage where neither woman can quite exit their roles.
The decision to keep María locked in that space, literally refusing to change costume or step outside the frame of the character, transforms what could've been a conventional relationship drama into something about the permeability of performance—one choice that rewires the entire emotional architecture.