rsaavedra

Two women fall in love within a culture/community that condemns lesbians. Said community is moreover itself discriminated as a whole: gitanos (gypsies) in Spain.

Found the execution of such thorny abstract not only realistic, also truly poetic. Specially the very last scenes, to the very last millisecond of footage. Both visually, and also sound-wise. Measured, exquisitely beautiful, flooring.

Some emotional reactions and storms, as well as very spontaneous, joyful moments, feel almost like parts of a documentary. They ended up captured quite naturally, non-pretentiously. Surprised to learn afterwards that the actors (at least some?) were non-professionals. Many other movies with professional actors do not approach the level this one does. Imho it gives you that sense of having just witnessed a true work of art.

Watched the full original anime, and wrote a review here on IMDB for it not too long ago, that was a 9/10 for me. This one, just a 7/10. Borrows characters and some plot pieces from the original, but boy it is not fully faithful to it. The anime hardcore fans will not like that.

Positives: acting-wise I liked most of all Jet, then Spike, Faye, Ana, then Julia. For Julia, her "I'm on Mars" song is truly gorgeous. Vicious for me here was almost funnier than scary though. His character adaptation however is clearly not the same calculating cold-blooded commanding killer he was in the anime. Rather an impulsive psycho brat.

Negatives: well, the adaptation itself. It is quite off from the original in some important points. There can be infinite ways to depart from any original, and the magnitude of the departures can also go different ways, so specific choices had to be made of course. But the ones they made leave me thinking there could have been quite some better options: either still departing possibly even more from the original, or with fewer departures, or remaining completely faithful.

Something I perceived and liked from the anime was a sort of recurrent blues atmosphere. Loss, longing, sadness, failures, mistakes, betrayals, resignation. This adaptation also has that, but as if toned down or rushed through in some cases.

Certain music pieces in the anime played with the images as if in a masterful and sublime artistic trance, lasting generously. Analogous scenes in this adaptation, however, even with slow motion for me seemed nowhere near as trance-like in comparison, not achieving the same level of "blues beauty," also typically ending too quickly. An example: the gorgeous children's choir a capella song.

Julia's song "I'm on Mars," and some aspects of the ending of this 1st season seem to try to reach those sublime "lows" of the blues vibes in the original. I wish they had continued with further seasons. Maybe they would have managed to match, or even surpass that down the road? Who knows.