‘Foremost By Night’: Venice Review

Dir: Victor Iriarte. Spain/Portugal/France. 2023. 109 mins.

Spain’s refusal to openly confront the darker side of its 20th century past means that there are lots of stories, sometimes horrific, which remain largely unexplored on film. One of them, the removal of an estimated 300,000 children from their politically “unsuitable” mothers by Franco’s nationalists and the church to be given up for adoption during and after the Civil War, is the subject of Victor Iriarte’s admirable, well-crafted feature debut Foremost by Night. 

An utterly shameful and sordid period in Spanish history in which state and the church effectively colluded in crime 

Though it ranges ambitiously across an unsettlingly wide range of styles and moods, the film seems to be doing everything it can to not tell its story straight, and never quite finds its groove - including, crucially, its emotional groove. This film about the profoundly human impact of politics on women’s lives has a lot to say about the politics, but too little about the lived feelings of its victims. For its tackling of tricky, darkly complex moral themes, Foremost By Night deserves further festival play following its Venice Days premiere: as a cinematic experience, less so.

The events are narrated in three chapters, with a great deal of what happens delivered via letters read out in undramatic voiceover. The strongest is the first, which amounts to a grim and darkly gripping exploration of the moral awfulness of extreme power. Court stenographer Vera (Almodovar regular Lola Duenas) is forced by circumstance to give up her son Egoz (Manuel Egozcue) for adoption: but when, years later, she tries to get back in touch with him, she is met with one bureaucratic obstacle after another, and eventually with the news that her son never existed: the legal system has simply erased Egoz from the records. 

Passionate, intense and obsessive, Vera refuses to accept this and decides to devote her life to taking revenge on the system, becoming in the process a somewhat unlikely blackmailer and hard-boiled detective. There’s enough material packed in here for a Netflix series, and though it’s impressive that Iriarte can pack so much plot into half an hour, it inevitably feels sketchy, like much of the rest of the film.

The second section is told from the points of view of Egoz, soon to turn 18, and his adoptive mother Cora (Ana Torrent, who as a child starred in Victor Erice’s 1973 masterpiece The Spirit of the Beehive and later in Alejandro Amenabar’s debut Thesis).They live an apparently untroubled life in San Sebastian until Vera’s letters to Egoz start to arrive: the inner disturbance this causes him is shown in a remarkable, intense dance sequence and, less subtly, in a manic late-night car drive he undertakes, as well as in the pained letters he writes in reply to Vera. Cora and Egoz decide to head to rural Portugal, where they will be joined by Vera, and where some unexpectedly bucolic riverside scenes will play out before a frankly preposterous final sequence.

The intentions of Foremost By Night are laudable - it’s an exploration of an utterly shameful and sordid period in Spanish history in which state and the church effectively colluded in crime (incredibly, the last recorded case of this was as late as 1990, although it’s difficult to square this with Egoz’s age in the movie). It is also a dissection of the emotional fallout in the lives of its victims - of how a patriarchal system can wreak havoc on even the most basic of human bonds, that between mother and child. It is also careful to show that the system has deceived both of the women, not just Vera: if there’s a positive message to be drawn from this psycho-political tragedy, it’s that it can draw women into solidarity across social borders.

But what’s missing - remarkably for a story which is surely crying out for it - is the human dimension, the emotional undertow. Despite terrific work by Duenas in particular, as a woman whose fragility in early life has now morphed into an almost superhuman determination to get the job done, the character work is extremely thin. There’s always the sense that these three figures are parts in a kind of abstract technical puzzle that Iriarte has decided to set himself and solve, rather than the victims of an awful human situation.

Events play out in a parallel, metatextual world of symbolism, formal experimentation and cross-cultural referencing which is sometimes effective and sometimes not: it’s fine when hands move across maps which occupy the whole screen, or when the fingers of Vera as she types are echoed by those of Egoz as he plays the piano, indicating a shared bond between them despite their separation.  But too many of the scenes in this somewhat disjointed piece seem to be staged for cinematic effect, as when Cora and Egoz sit silently in a Portuguese bar listening to an appropriately mournful fado. And when we suddenly find ourselves, for no apparent reason, watching large stretches of the second section through a circular mask, as in an old-style iris shot, the formal apparatus becomes an obstacle that becomes merely alienating.