Pimpollo
2019 · 8m · España
Directed by Eduardo Dieste, Guillermo Dieste
Tones: contemplative, tender
Cristina and Fran, a young married couple, travel by car through Madrid. During the journey they begin several arguments in which each questions the roles they must play when their future child is born, discovering how the society we grow up in influences each of our relationships.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a domestic argument film dressed up as philosophical inquiry, which sounds insufferable, but the Diestes flip the script by letting the couple's bickering actually *mean* something—they're not performing intimacy, they're demolishing it in real time, which is refreshingly ugly for what could've been NPR-podcast earnestness.
A formally precise chamber piece that sits comfortably in the lineage of Haneke's relationship deconstructions and the Spanish new wave's interest in social conditioning; the car as mise-en-scène (confined, mobile, inescapable) becomes the film's central formal argument about how roles trap us.
The masterstroke is the sound design's refusal to underscore the emotional beats—dialogue overlaps, the engine hum persists, ambient Madrid bleeds through—which makes every fought word feel ripped from actual breath rather than scripted vulnerability, and that choice alone transforms what could've been earnest into something almost painfully real.