Pijamas
2008 · 14m · España
Directed by Elena Trapé
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Marta's family collapses the night a police call notifies them that her grandmother has been found wandering the streets; in the hospital, while the adults exchange reproaches, the grandmother, on losing her memory, recovers in her granddaughter's eyes something much more important — a tragicomedy about memory.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the grandmother's deterioration to be the tragedy here—but Trapé flips it, making memory loss the doorway to something redemptive, which is either profound or saccharine depending on your tolerance for tenderness, and I'm genuinely unsure which side I land on.
A formally composed elegy on the Dardenne-inflected register of contemporary European family drama; the restraint in how Trapé handles the hospital scene—what she doesn't cut to, how long she holds on faces—suggests a filmmaker fluent in the grammar of intimate realism.
The film lives or dies on whether you believe that single moment when the grandmother looks at her granddaughter and something shifts in her eyes—Trapé holds it just long enough that the performance does the work other films would need dialogue for, and that economy is everything.