In El anorak rojo, the miraculous emptiness of Furstenberg Square in May 1968, the bar in a Madrid nightclub in the 1990s, and the deserted lobby of a small movie theatre today merge into a single imaginary geography. Between Paris and Madrid - the two cities where Arrietta has built, for six decades now, a discrete yet essential filmography - a network of connections is woven, whose logic resembles less that of memory than that of a secret correspondence. Alone in the lobby of a cinema, X and Z are having a conversation. He remembers. She asks questions. The character of X, like an alter ego of the director drawn from his own films, merges with the experiences, figures and places that have filled Arrietta’s work since the 1960s. But the result is neither a game of mirrors nor a nostalgic recapitulation: it is a brand-new narrative, as sweet as the morning after a night of intoxication that would have lasted for decades, like a dream in a fairy tale. The fleeting glimpse of someone’s back in a nightclub, a red anorak, and a pill of the same color offered by a handsome stranger set off a series of encounters and missed meetings that seem to obey a single law: that of necessity.
Serge Daney once said that what Arrietta’s characters are seeking, essentially, is to “prolong a dream”, and Marguerite Duras spoke of a “magical pleonasm” to describe the intense pull of the narrative on images in Pointilly (1972), the direct forebear of El anorak rojo. Only Arrietta, who is used to working at length in solitude, like a painter or a writer, adding and removing layers, could undertake the painting of this almost mystical, elusive, silent vision, composed of brief touches like sporadic apparitions, bathed in the phosphorescent light of a lengthy erotic hallucination.
Manuel Asín