SUNDAYS
FOUR STARS A teenage girl considers joining an order of cloistered nuns. While her father is supportive to a point, her aunt is appalled.
DRAMA SPAIN Spanish #SUNDAYS Starring Blanca Soroa, Patricia López Arnaiz
Ever considered becoming a nun? Not many people have, and even fewer do. Yet teenage Aniara is thinking about it, much to the surprise of her father and horror of her atheist aunty. Spanish filmmaker Alauda Ruiz de Azúa takes this unlikely premise and turns it into a thoughtful, quietly gripping drama about faith, family and the difficulty of knowing what is best for someone else.
Set in Spain’s Basque region, the film centres on 17-year-old Ainara (Blanca Soroa), a reserved student at a Catholic school who begins contemplating a life as a cloistered nun. Her widowed father, Iñaki (Miguel Garcés), is rebuilding his life with his new partner, Estíbaliz, while Ainara’s aunt Maite (Patricia López Arnaiz) remains a particularly protective presence. As Ainara’s religious inclinations develop into something more serious, her family struggles to understand what is driving her. Is this a considered spiritual awakening, or a young woman making an impulsive choice before she has experienced enough of the world to know what she really wants from it?
As Ainara moves closer to the convent, whose austere, enclosed existence seems a bewildering destination for someone so young, Maite, in particular, refuses to accept the apparent inevitability of her niece’s decision. She becomes more combative as others - notably the girl’s father - hesitate over how far they should intervene. Meanwhile, the religious community offers its own understanding of Ainara’s intentions, raising uncomfortable questions about what is a genuine calling and just desire to escape the uncertainties of ordinary life. Boy shaped uncertainties.
What is refreshing here is a willingness to take religion seriously without making religious belief the butt of a secular joke. Whether Ainara’s eventual direction represents fulfilment or a tragic mistake depends very much on your own perspective. Ruiz de Azúa maintains a remarkably sure grip on the competing arguments, allowing neither believers nor sceptics to dominate the discussion. And that ambiguity is the film’s great strength. The result is never polemical, yet its many perspectives remain carefully integrated into a coherent dramatic whole.
The performances are persuasive throughout, particularly Soroa, whose extraordinary composure conveys a depth of conviction that might seem improbable in someone so young. She makes Ainara neither an unquestioning innocent nor an implausibly precocious philosopher, but a person of conviction even when they remain tantalisingly beyond everyone else’s reach.
SUNDAYS is measured, intelligent filmmaking, and its refusal to deliver an easy verdict lingers long after the final, dramatic, scene.
Comments