Rubita
2014 · 17m · España
Directed by Jota Linares
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, theatrical
Norma imitates someone who never believed she deserved to be imitated; a blonde wig and a mole next to her mouth make her be someone she is not in front of Penélope's lens, who tries to recreate the last photo session that Marilyn Monroe realized before dying.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The Monroe recreation angle feels like the safe play—what actually interests me is Norma disappearing into someone else's myth, the wig doing the heavy lifting while the real subject gets erased. It's almost there, but it leans too hard on the biographical celebrity gravity when the weirder film is about impersonation as a kind of self-annihilation.
Linares inherits a lineage of cinema-about-cinema and portrait studies, using the Monroe session as formal constraint rather than mere subject—the theatrical tone and melancholic distance recall a certain European essay-film tradition, and the precision of that mole, that wig, that lens create a considered meditation on authenticity and the photographic lie.
The decision to let the wig do the performance work rather than rely on mimicry or voice is what saves this from biographical tourism; Norma's stillness behind the blonde becomes the film's actual subject, and that restraint in the performance is what makes seventeen minutes feel earned rather than padded.