Un Bany Propi

#SIFF Main Competition, a very complete and tearful story about middle-aged and elderly women’s self-breakthrough. The theme of “freedom after being bound” runs through the whole story, so we see a 65-year-old woman’s self-exploration in writing in a slightly unreal setting.

She has love, and perhaps she also enjoys taking care of her husband and family every day. A goldfish swimming out of the toilet represents a possibility hidden in her heart: her passion for writing has never faded. Trapped by time and every minute of life, she began to wander around countless toilets and create her own "bathroom literature". Her innocent girlfriend, another toilet artist who is keen on doing housework like crazy after xd, her husband who never understands her but loves each other... These people all affect her life and accompany her, but she is going further and further on the road of finding hobbies and herself. She built her own "bathroom bedroom", but gradually felt lonely. She thought that giving up herself could return to find happiness, but she also found that everything was about her own topic: how can I break the wall between the special me and the bound rules. Finally, she finally found a possibility to invite others to this special room, and even if her husband could not break through the boundaries of his life in the end, it did not affect the fact that they loved each other.

Technically, I like it very much. The art of large color blocks creates a great stage effect and absurdity, so the film is set in a fantasy realism theme. I think the film is very detailed because it abandons more details in reality and focuses on discussing the self-exploration and growth of this woman. The soundtrack is very good. The housework at the beginning caught me directly. The subsequent emotional guidance and replacement of lines to express emotions and feelings are also very successful, which makes me feel the importance of the soundtrack.

What moved me the most was her nightmare of being trapped in the toilet. It was also when we returned to the toilet at the end and saw her childhood trauma that we realized the theme of the story more clearly: she thought that her own world and free space and choice were actually a dilemma, a fear and bondage, a kind of panic in her heart that separated her from the people she loved. Thinking about our parents again, I was a little tearful. When they took a step to accept new things and tried to "find themselves" as young people say, every step was lonely and difficult. When she expanded the space, I think she was also surprised and delighted.

Everything starts with Wolfe's "Only women with money and a room can write novels" and ends with "Antonia has money and a bathroom of her own", making everything practical and complete. Self-breakthrough is not big or small, every step counts and every step is moving.

The title and theme of the movie come from Woolf's book, and I chose this movie because it felt very much like Chantal Akerman's film "Jeanne Dielman". My first feeling after watching the movie as a whole was that it was hard to imagine that this was the director's first work. The photography and sound effects are absolutely worthy and suitable for the big screen. Every scene of the photography is extremely beautiful, and the "balance" it creates is like the scale that the heroine wants to place between her life and her ideals. The house of the heroine Antonia has a retro feel (like going back to the period of Jeanne Dielman) and there is a scene that looks very much like "Anna's Journey". The sound effects of this film are very bright and some are exaggerated (designed as a thriller). The housewife Antonia is a girl who likes to write and secretly observe the things around her in the bathroom and toilet. I think such a confined space can give her a sense of "privilege" and "territory", because anyone who needs to enter this "place" must say hello first, and she observes the world like a child, escaping from the oppression brought by reality to find her inner world, and the moral concerns that this film brought to me also gradually "disappeared" after a conversation between the heroine and her bestie at the end. Antonia's bathroom can actually be said to be letting go of the label obligations brought by society and gender and truly being yourself, I think it should be like this (in fact, I feel that I didn't understand it. It would be nice if there was an interview with the director to watch)

The title of the 2024 Golden Goblet Award-winning film A Bathroom of One's Own comes from Woolf's "A Room of One's Own". The protagonist Antonia also writes, but she does not write in her room, which only has a double bed. She writes in the bathroom, or more precisely, on the toilet. This film is her fantasy travelogue of the toilet.

Antonia, 65, is a housewife who spends her days in a two-bedroom, one-living-room middle-class apartment, doing laundry, washing dishes, cooking stews for family gatherings, and sleeping on a 1.8-meter bed with her husband. No one in her family knows that when she is alone, she becomes a toilet poet, wandering around the city, writing and fantasizing on all kinds of toilets.

In the toilet, she listened to stories about sewer pipes, sinks, and the madness of punks. The area around the toilet is not only a place where human nature is revealed, but also a paradise for imagination. After finishing housework and her husband going to work, she picked up a pen and paper, locked the door, and enjoyed this only place where she would not be disturbed. The water in the toilet was like a source of inspiration. Here she wrote stories that her husband never read, and she also met Fernando, a goldfish who accidentally entered the toilet puddle from the sewer. Antonia is lucky. At 65, she still has friends, a sense of humor, and even a million-dollar inheritance from a female relative that suddenly came to her, with a note from Woolf, "If a woman wants to write a novel, she must have money and a room of her own." The woman has money, which is reflected in her determination to participate in the short story competition and in banging the table louder for her sons after cooking the stew. Later, she simply moved her bed, desk and Fernando into the bathroom of her house and lived there from then on. She wrote here, had afternoon tea with friends, and danced. She is the protagonist of the space in the bathroom, and men are intruders. She allowed him to come in, urinate, and then leave. "I have become the space I live in. I am nothing, but I am everything."

The most moving scene in the movie takes place in Antonia's memories - the toilet door opens again and again, the camera keeps switching, and the life scenes of the little girl to old age fly out like pictures. In the toilet, she hides from the elementary school dean, skips classes to read novels, has sex, stares at the pregnancy test stick in a trance, vomits, and smokes when she gets old. It is not a square, not an auditorium, but a toilet that houses a woman's life biography, but why only a toilet?

The director of A Bathroom of One's Own, Lucia Casal Rodríguez, is from Spain and was born in 1996. This film is her first feature film, but it is already very mature. In a light and playful style, we follow Antonia in her daydreams and wandering around the bathroom, occupying the space with fantasy and humor. I wish we all have a bathroom of our own, and I wish we have more than one bathroom.

The first part of siff2024, I stole half a day of leisure and was healed by the movie. It was a surprise and a beautiful atmosphere. I chose it blindly but I had a feeling I liked it. After watching it, I have a lot to say but I didn’t have time to write it down

I remember sitting in the middle, the girl on the left sobbing softly, I was very moved, especially the moment when she closed the book she wrote in the last scene. The middle-aged version of Amelie, the smart female director's temperament, a toilet reflects the owner's personality, the heroine's inspiration is enthusiastic but deeply self-doubted, I don't know what I'm doing, I can empathize with her, the toilet is surreal, the toilet is its own space, but it depends on the male space, but the woman opens up the space, peels it off, transforms it into an independent world, entertains friends, and regains autonomy. The last scene is face to face with her husband, but there is still a picture frame. Does it mean that they are still not integrated?

I was very surprised that the main creators were sitting behind me and watching the movie with us. It was not until I stood up that I realized that the female lead was very elegant and the female director was very young. I was so surprised. When asked about her favorite scene, the female lead said it was pushing open the wall of the toilet, and the director said it was the constant opening and closing of the toilet door, giving a glimpse into a woman's life.

The daily Spanish conversations at home are so familiar that it brings me back to the time when I lived in Argentina. If you miss it, just watch Spanish movies to bring back those memories.

Later I realized how pity it was that I didn't win the prize

This is my favorite movie at this year's Shanghai Film Festival, and it is also one of the main entries.

The story is about a housewife in her sixties who wants to participate in a short story writing competition and starts writing stories. The themes of her stories are also her own bathroom, other people's bathrooms, restaurants, libraries, and cinema washrooms. It is a story about why women need to stay in bathrooms.

A typical female film, some people may criticize the old-fashioned and shallow feminism it expounds, but it is this old-fashioned "little heroine" narrative that touches people. Because it is real, because it cannot be more real. I chose to watch this film because I was obsessed with staying in the bathroom for a while, reading books, watching TV shows, doing homework, and falling asleep in the bathroom. The obsession and persistence with a certain space, the right to close the door so that others should not break in, and the placement of oneself, in the bathroom.

As the title suggests, the film also mentions Woolf's A Room of One's Own: If a woman wants to write, she must have money and a room of her own. Family, children, and husbands who love you but don't understand you, friends who can share but can't empathize, and short escapes from the unstoppable laundry, folding, vacuuming, and cooking, this is why it is called a "little heroine" story. It's not a big house of your own, and all you can build is a bathroom.

It's all about space. The ever-compacting self, along with the dining table, bed, sofa, and TV that I have to share with my husband, takes away my freedom to wear sneakers, my freedom to mourn, and all my time and space, and finally squeezes into the bathroom before I can close the door.

What made me feel suffocated at one point in the film was the constant knocking of the door by the dean after the heroine was bullied in school as a child and hid in the toilet. In all the spaces in the world, women's self has no place to show nor is it allowed to hide.

Seeing the big from the small is the unique beauty of this kind of film, and I was even more surprised to find that the director was born after 1996. The film has bright colors, the heroine's slightly neutral voice, and interspersed female humor. The film is a little gap that pries open the space for women.