Watch an Exclusive Clip from the Delightful Oddball Movie 'El Planeta'
The film is the directorial debut of artist Amalia Ulman and it's one of the best of the year.
In Amalia Ulman's debut feature film El Planeta, Martin Scorsese is coming to Spain and it's the only thing announcers on the radio can seem to talk about. This is actually true. In fact, his arrival is a little bit of documentary woven into the fictional narrative about a pair of mother-daughter amateur grifters. The Taxi Driver filmmaker was awarded the 2018 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts.
Ulman, who stars in the movie alongside her actual mother, has a tendency to throw a little bit of reality into her fiction. Very loosely based on two women from Gijón—the seaside town where Ulman was raised—who pretend to be rich, the Sundance hit stars Ulman and her mother Ale as Leo and María. This child-parent pair go about their lives in active denial of their financial status, capitalizing on every opportunity they have to live a life of luxury. María likes to pretend her daughter is dating a mayoral candidate, which she discusses in the above clip where she chatters about Scorsese's visit and her dislike of Sharon Stone. Is she delusional or is it all a ruse? Ulman likes to keep the answer to that question up in the air.
While the director, who got her start as a conceptual artist using social media as a medium, and her mother are not actually scammers, there is a whiff of biography to El Planeta. Like Amalia, Leo's legs were injured in a bus accident; Amalia and Ale lost their home, just as Leo and María are on the verge of doing in the film. But the production, shot in black and white, has an air of surreality. You enter not only Gijón, but also the worldview of the protagonists for whom survival also requires a bit of self deception. It's disorienting and also very funny.
Scorsese happens to have actually come to the region, but if he hadn't it would have been an ingenious choice of a celebrity for María to fawn over. Leo and María are, in a way, low level versions of the types of characters Scorsese has been preoccupied with in his career: People who see better lives for themselves and will ignore anyone who tries to get in their way.
You can see for yourself why this film is so special in theaters across the country or on VOD this weekend.