‘Saturn Return’ Review: Spain’s Oscar Submission Is a Chaotically Honest and Formally Audacious Music Biopic
variety.comCarlos Aguilar Cigarette ash piles on top of a few discarded CDs inside a darkened room where the members of a rock band, Los Planetas, struggle to make tracks for their new album.
That brief shot conveys more than the mere disarray of the space. Those likely ruined discs symbolize a certain anarchic disregard for music as it exists in its contained, marketable and profitable form.
For this group, music only matters as long as it’s pouring from their not-so-hidden inner wounds and taking shape under the influence of drugs and the ferocious dynamic between them.
It’s from the chaos — both visible and hidden in their minds — that the songs nurture themselves. The astounding feat of directors Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez’s “Saturn Return” is how it cinematically evokes that intertwined creative and personal turmoil with frantic visual energy and formal audaciousness, refusing to capitulate to any subgenre conventions.
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