“The August Virgin” starts with a death, albeit off-screen. When Eva goes to pick up the keys to the apartment she’ll be staying in for August, the writer who lives there tells her about an article he’s been commissioned to write about the recently deceased philosopher Stanley Cavell.
He explains the admiration Cavell had for the Hollywood comedies of the 1930s, particularly the progressive films of Barbara Stanwyck and Katherine Hepburn, whose pictures the academic celebrated for being “about feminine identity, the courage of being oneself, knowing who you really are.” Director Jonás Trueba couldn’t have made the thesis statement for his latest feature any clearer.
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