In David Trueba’s Always Winter, the closing night film at this year’s Valladolid Film Festival in Spain, 40-year-old unemployed landscape gardener Miguel Mena (David Verdaguer) travels to a conference in Brussels to pitch his “Garden of Life” project, which invites people to sit on grass or benches and contemplate a three-minute hourglass.
“We love hourglasses because they are a visual representation of the passage of time. It allows us to see things passing by that we will never see – the passage of time,” Miguel said with authority on stage. And he can’t remember how to proceed.
“The important thing is to get back to the real world. Technology has become the true religion,” he said in a debate the next day.
Even from a distance, Miguel could be talking about David Trueba’s movies.
This is the first time in his 30-year career that Trueba, whose films The Good Life and Salamina Soldiers were selected for the Cannes Film Festival, will adapt one of his novels, and the global smash hit 2015 novella Blitz, into a film, with Liberation praising it as “delicious, original and delicate”.
In both films, Miguel is accompanied to meetings by his dazzlingly beautiful girlfriend, Marta (Amaia Salamanca), his sole source of emotional support. In Brussels, Marta reveals that she has broken up with him. “Miguel, hurt and out of place, meets Olga (Isabelle Renaud), an older woman who works as a volunteer at an architectural conference. With her by his side, he begins to rebuild himself and understand what his new life project is,” the film’s synopsis ends.
Bringing the power of film to the table
But “Always Winter” shows off the full power of cinema. There are several ways to do this.
Some people may have read “Blitz” in one sitting, while others may not. “Always Winter” will probably be seen by everyone at once, at least when it hits theaters. This allows the film to more clearly capture the emotional density of time. The January chapter lasts 90 minutes when Miguel is left behind in Malta until he meets Olga. The other months until the last December fly by in chapters that are less than a minute long.
A single shot captures the felt strangeness of the rupture. During Miguel’s stay, Miguel was found lying in bed when Marta was about to leave her hotel in Brussels to return to Madrid. Marta’s face enters the frame, kisses her goodbye, and then she disappears. The camera continues for a few seconds to show Miguel in a new emotional state for the rest of his life, without Marta.
Above all, the film captures the ravages and awe of time, as the real world emerges in scenes of indisputable wonder: the faces and bodies of actors, or the sudden appearance of the sun on the Mediterranean horizon at dawn.
“Always Winter” reunites Trueba with actor David Verdager, Ikil Films, Atresmedia Cine, La Terraza Films and Film Factory, the stars, producers and distributors of 2023’s “Jokes & Cigarettes,” which grossed €891,991 ($972,270) in Spanish theaters. Verdaguer won the Spanish Academy Goya Award for his performance in “Jokes and Cigarettes,” making him the first actor in history to win the Spanish Academy Award for Best Actor.
Variety spoke to Trueba on the eve of the 2025 Valladolid Film Festival about the power of cinema, After Great Love, and coming of age of sorts.
You’ve said that some aspects of Blitz that reflect the passage of time lend themselves to new expression in the film. One may be the emotional density of time captured in the length of January, which contrasts with many of the other chapters. You can feel it even more strongly in movies…
absolutely. Yes, I think it’s more noticeable. There’s also the visual aspect. Although bodies can be depicted in books, differences in age and body skin are more noticeable in movies.
Did the fact that you developed the story in the text “Blitz” inspire you to focus more on the specifically “cinematic” aspects of “Always Winter”?
Let’s just say the second or final part of “Always Winter” was about just that. You’re trying to find a cinematic way to tell seemingly the same story, but in a different way than the way it’s told in the novel. Precisely because in the novel there is a narrator’s voice and it is easy to sit and understand what he is thinking. In this sense, movies are more eternal…
The film begins with a fairly open title. The title “Always Winter” seems to refer to Miguel’s mental breakdown, but three-quarters of the way through the movie, Miguel just says it as a joke about not being able to turn off the air conditioner in his office and getting cold because of it.
The novel was called “Blitz”. In the movie, Olga is no longer German, so it didn’t make much sense to keep the title. “Always Winter” refers to a state of mind. After the rupture, there is a kind of emotional block, like a freeze. You end up becoming a person who can neither give nor receive. I’m very interested in that. Although it looks normal at first glance, it is actually blocked. People ask me: Isn’t that a little sad for a title? My answer is that if you look at David Verdager, you can immediately see the irony in the title….
I feel like this movie is asking if breakups are part of a larger life cycle…
Beyond separation, even when there is the death of someone close, from that point on, life seems to be about surviving that absence and continuing to live despite that absence. What this film is trying to convey is the feeling that something is missing, and in some ways will be missing now and forever. In other words, your life received the message. What Martin Amis called “information”. You must learn to live with this information because you did not have this baggage before living a different life. Accumulating experience changes a person.
In a way, “Always Winter” can be called a coming-of-age story in which Miguel learns to abandon the sexist taboo that men cannot have relationships with significantly older women.
And without realizing it, he had formed judgments and rival opinions with architects who had joined his firm. Miguel learns that people are not always what they seem and that opinions about people are often too hasty. And when you learn it, you start to feel a little better about the world.
This feeling of growing older goes in a different direction. Marta seems like a funny kid. Olga also talks about how her grandson is feverish and is always asking, “What are we going to do now?” And after her own great love ended, she lost that feeling…
Miguel must learn that he cannot remain petrified by clinging to the past. After something, there is something. he has to learn it.
I announced in April that Film Factory would pick up Always Winter, and wrote that it melded the intimacy and vulnerability of Fletch’s characters, the bathhouses of Spain’s Rafael Azcona, and the structural play of Britain’s Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Ian McEwan generation. But maybe I’m completely wrong…
Certainly, one of the big influences on me is the spirit of films like Eric Rohmer. For example, “My Night at Maud’s House”. A film that takes place in a closed space, the spectacle is one of intimacy. I have also always had a great affinity for much of Julian Barnes’ work. He writes about time, absence, and relationships, mixing elements from animalistic behavior to the rationality of educated characters with more sophisticated reactions.
