Trot (Trote)

This is a cold, uninvolving film that indulges in banal images and obvious metaphors. Conflict and imprisonment appear everywhere. Dinner tables offer impromptu interrogations while car backseats provide erotic solace. Everyone stares at each other. The brooding is bleak and ridiculous. We’re supposed to feel the frictions of civility and barbarism, of ancient and new. It doesn’t acknowledge the comic absurdity of tragedy, the fine movements of despair.

Carme (María Vázquez) suffers a grand oppression in the Galician mountains. She desires escape. Her mother is in the last throes of life; her father (Celso Bugallo) barely utters a word. It’s an unambiguously grim existence, one thwarted at every breath. Carme’s life is one of boredom in a bakery. A job serving drinks or working in a hotel is preferable. She has the symptoms of clinical depression.

Her brother is macho, his brow furrowed. Luís (Diego Anido) returns with his wife María (Tamara Canosa) for the local festival, “Rapa das Bestas”. Round up the roaming wild horses and defile their liberty; this the apparently timeless battle fought between beast and man. It’s not long before he ogles his exhausted sister and imparts belated career advice.

Xacio Baño has produced a moody, sullen work that excites itself through equine imagery. We’re invited to focus on the barrel of the stallion, to see within its heaving stomach and between its protruding ribs. Look closely enough and you’ll glimpse allegory. With the headlock imposed and the mane cut, man’s dominion is asserted. Carme gazes on, barely emancipated.

Joseph Owen

Trot (Trote) does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Locarno Film Festival 2018 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Locarno Film Festival website here.