Los lunes al sol is a film that demands a lot from the viewer and is easy to dismiss or read superficially. The comments from your timed writings (below) were selected for the way that they show a high level of engagement with the film and for their success in seeing beyond the surface. -Prof. Cope
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I feel that Santa’s humor throughout the film keeps the charisma of every character up. At first, I felt that he was apathetic and irresponsible, but after his speech in Rico’s bar, I understand that he lost much more than his job during the protests. He lost his way of life, he lost his comrades, and he lost himself.
Poetic realism can also be seen in the film. The film uses dark humor and self-deprecating humor, showing the poetic realism of combining comedy and tragedy.
Los lunes al sol remains relatively stagnant, cinematically, throughout the film. Shots are often still, at eye-level with the characters, and not particularly long; in other words, the film is cinematically unobtrusive, meant to reflect the ‘aesthetic of depiction’ of Zavattini’s ideal rather than the poetic vision of Buñuel’s. That is, until Santa enters Amador’s apartment. A vision of squalor and poverty, Santa has an epiphany: this is the path he is on. This realization is left up to the viewer, however, and the film suggests it in a beautiful, poetic sequence that features some of the film’s most profound imagery.
The continuous exploration of his friend’s condition needed no over the top music or camerawork. It felt natural the way the camera weaved through the aprtment, allowing the audience to explore the apartment with Santa. Never have I seen a greater significance in prop use [mise-en-scene] than in this movie. The placement of significant objects like mirrors, glasses, or even the misplacement of an object like the urn.
The boat drifting in the water was the greatest feat of irony in the whole movie, challenging the concept of what a neo-realist ending should be.
On the ferry, Santa is trapped, both literally and figuratively, and lacks control over his future. In placing the characters on a ferry and filming several scenes from this location, Aranoa demonstrates the precariousness of the characters’ situations. They cannot control what happens and they are simply stuck being swept along in the world. …. In using the ferry as a central symbol of the characters’ personal progression throughout the film, Aranoa brings concepts of poetic realism into the film. The symbolism of the ship is a rather poetic element, as it represents loss of control, entrapment, and the inability to move forward independently.
I also think that this film exhibits Buñuel’s collective approach to neorealism. The movie is not just telling the story of one main character, but of many.
I think the film resembles Zavattini’s style of neo-realism more so than it does Buñuel because of the idea of a collective group of people.
We see a fifteen-year-old be sexualized by an older man; a woman temporarily abandons her child for prostitution; men watch women wear bikinis on television, and a wife feels neglected by her husband. However, women are later shown as dynamic characters with depth and emotion.
The camera breaks the 180-degree rule and actually moves through the plane between Reina and Santa’s conversation, and although we are never given a direct POV, each angle is based off of the circle around Santa. He is not only physically but socially the center of the group, that holds each member together.
The film is very melancholic and makes the viewer uncomfortable with its length, yet this permitted the audience to be more conscious of how slow time passes when one is in unemployment or in a period of waiting.
Los lunes al sol literally uses an example of how to make a neorealist film that Zavattini provides in Some Ideas on the Cinema in order to explore neorealism. Zavattini says that before neorealism, “…if one was thinking over the idea of a film on, say, a strike, one was immediately forced to invent a plot and the strike itself became on the background of the film. Today, our attitude would be one of ‘revelation’: we would describe the strike itself, try to weed out the largest possible number of human, moral, social, economic, poetic values from the bare documentary fact.” Los lunes al sol played with and emulated Zavattini’s expectation for a film when it chose to explore how the failure of a strike affects workers.
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