Produced with Javier Ambrossi, director of La Bola Negra and a main competition nominee at the Cannes Film Festival, and Javier Calbo (Veneno, La Mesias), the Movistar Plus+ original “I Always Sometimes” begins with love at first sight.
Lola (Ana Boga), a Berlin festival organizer, and Ruben (David Menendez), a bar owner, met at the music festival Sonar and now walk the streets of Barcelona at night quoting Rilke. They attend a rave in Montjuiche, hang out at a chic bar run by a friend of Ruben’s, and after some great sex, Ruben suggests they move in together.
Cut to the episode. 2. Laura gets pregnant a week after meeting Ruben, leaves home – he turns out to be a drunkard and a spendthrift – and returns to her suffocating parents.
The remaining episodes, created by Marta Basols and Marta Rosa, all take their titles from where Laura hunkers down with her young child Mario, while she desperately tries to find her own apartment and earn enough money to raise Mario in Barcelona, a city full of wealthy tourists and gentrification, but she has to spend most of her time caring for her beloved Mario.
“The rent here is insane. It’s impossible to find anything,” Laura complains to her artist friend. “Nothing is impossible,” he retorts. “The Barcelona apartment is like that,” Laura replied fiercely.
A moving interpretation of motherhood based on the nightmarish financial situation and real-life modern life of single motherhood, and the emotional turmoil of being in your early 30s, “I Always Something” was released on April 23 on Movistar Plus+ in Spain. The film will make its international debut in major international competition at the Cannes series in two days.
Shot in six episodes of 22 to 35 minutes, “I Always Sometimes” marks an auspicious screenwriting debut for Basoles and Rosa, and is a great example of Javiz’s upbringing in Spain. Basols, who played Roberta on “This Is Not Sweden,” also appeared in “La Messias.” Rosa served as art director for the television series Mariliendre, also produced by Javis’ production company Suma Content. The film was directed by Claudia Costafreda, who was the screenwriter for Jarvis’ breakout film Veneno before producing and directing Caldo, which was produced by Ambrossi and Calbo. Ginesta has directed episodes of the Cannes series winner “Perfect Live” and the Netflix blockbuster “Elite.”
In preparation for the Cannes series, Variety interviewed Las Maltas.
Laura and Ruben share their love for Rainer Maria Rilke, quoting a passage from “Letters to a Young Poet,” in which he advises, “The important thing is to live everything.” Similarly, Laura doesn’t want her existence to be defined by being a single mother…
Bathores: Laura likes sex, life, work, art, eating, and being with female friends. She likes the same things she would have wanted if she hadn’t become a mother. Childbirth does not eliminate a person’s previous things or eliminate all concerns. What Laura does is very important, but other things are also very important to her. Her success is that she always continues to see love and poetry despite her circumstances.
Most romances begin in normal life and end in happy endings. “I always sometimes” is the opposite.
Bathores: Episode 1 is like what happens after a happy ending.
Rosa: This is the story of a young woman trying to find her path in life. Millions of things happen to her. Episode 1 was originally a flashback to Episode 4. However, during editing they realized that context was missing, which gave the characters more depth and made the series more original. You get to understand more about Laura, where she’s coming from, her expectations, her origins, and you get to understand even more about the rest of her journey.
The tone of the episodes varies…
Rosa: Each episode has a different color and is set in a place that forms part of Laura’s life as she tries to find herself in the position she is in now. Each episode is like a standalone story that can be watched independently, and takes a lot of inspiration from Raymond Carver’s show stories. She lives in a different house and in a way is looking for a part of herself back where she was happy before she became a mother, but something has changed.
And how did you share the production?
Rosa: I directed the first episode, Claudia (Costafreda) directed the second, third and sixth episodes, and Ginesta (Gindal) directed the fourth and fifth episodes.
Also, were there any general guidelines for direction?
Rosa: My episode was the first, first romantic moment, so it was obvious that it had to be the opposite of the rest of the episodes. We took sequenced shots, gave the actors space, did a lot of rehearsal so they could make the dialogue their own, incorporated improvisation to break up the text, and gave everything a pre-dawn feel. In contrast, the fourth episode of Ginesta is the scene where Lola hits rock bottom, but there are a lot of cuts, editing, and acceleration, and I think that’s effective. Every episode had a different color, some warm, some cold, and episode 6, set in Berlin, was almost black and white.
However, most of the series is set in Barcelona, which is important.
Boras: Yes, Barcelona is usually perceived as a cool place, a cutting edge city that everyone wants to visit. Our series addresses issues of urban hostility, gentrification, “tourism” and the near-impossibility of fixed rents. If you have a lot of money, Barcelona is a great place to raise your children. It has beaches, parks, and climate. But we wanted “I Always Sometimes” to be full of nuance, where the great meets the hellish. And everyone in the movie can be good or bad at the same time, and the series’ title defines the city as well. It’s yin and yang. No one is purely anything. Everyone is full of contradictions. What we like is to reflect and embrace those things that we can work on to become better people…
The series has been described as a realistic vision of motherhood. Economic factors come up again and again, something you don’t often see in titles with female protagonists…
Rosa: In this series, we talk about the difficulty of juggling work and raising children, and enjoying it at the same time.
Boras: Neoliberalism is so bad right now that life is at the center and work is supposed to help us be happier and live better, but in order to survive we have to put work at the center of our lives.
‘I Always Sometimes’: Laura (Anna Boga) balances work and motherhood
