Leaving to Arrive: The Permanent Picture at Brussels

35-year-old Catalan Laura Ferrés says about her feature film debut The Permanent Picture (La imatge permanent; 2023): “I’m interested in everyday secrets.” The film tells the story of Antonia, an underage mother, who has fled impoverished rural Andalusia and left her newborn daughter Carmen behind in a male-dominated environment stifled by Catholicism. But half a century later, the two meet again in the Catalan metropolis of Barcelona. While Carmen searches for authentic faces and people for an advertising agency, Antonia ekes out a living as a perfume saleswoman on the street. Marked by mutual loneliness and uncertainty about their feelings, the unrecognizable women grow closer.

The Permanent Picture fascinates with extraordinary, symbolic camera angles (DoP: Agnès Piqué Corbera). At the beginning, a cold, blue-grey color aesthetic describes everyday (working) life in a closed village atmosphere in the early 1970s, before the end of the Franco era. Only traditional songs and dances offer the women small escapes from their less varied existence. The flamenco-style dance performance during the domestic harvest, the movement exercises of the old people’s home residents, or the communal singing during Carmen’s grandmother’s visit are all wonderful. The film thus lends a powerful voice to the search for female self-determination—without slipping into lethargy or tearfulness.

A veil of melancholy lies over this cosmos, which is still subliminally present to this day—poetically stylized, with carefully composed images thanks to meticulous framing. The reduced dialogue and appropriate use of sound are also well integrated into the overall dramatic concept of the film. The realism of the fragmentary family relationship is interspersed with absurd situation comedy and magical elements reminiscent of Víctor Erice’s film El sur from 1983. With this Spanish-French tragicomedy, Laura Ferrés must be counted among the most promising cinematic talents of her home country.

The very special, individual mother-daughter relationship also conveys the story of economic and political asynchrony, an internal Spanish labor migration. The shadows of the unresolved civil war hover unspoken as the burden of a leaden time over a silenced, silent generation. Through the presence of the deceased, visible in the family albums with almost animistic echoes, the past radiates into the immediate present in the form of double-exposed photographs. A present that threatens to repress even the most private memories in the unmistakable rhythmic change of the decades. 

The non-actresses Maria Luengo and Rosario Ortega make a significant contribution to the credibility of the film with their great charisma. Thanks to their subtle sensitivity, new nuances in the struggle for understanding, friendship, and intimacy are constantly revealed. Waiting and distance suddenly give way to closeness and human warmth.

In its home country and at numerous festivals, The Permanent Picture did not have a unanimously positive reception. Presented and recognized like a typical festival film, it was criticized for its artificiality and overly obvious elliptical structure. The overemphasis on the female perspective against the backdrop of the deceased father hovering over everything was also not met with unanimous approval.

Josef Nagel
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2024