‘Saturn Return’: Malaga Review

Dirs: Isaki Lacuesta, Pol Rodriguez. Spain. 2023. 109mins

With Saturn Return, feted Spanish director Isaki Lacuesta, responsible for supplying some of Spanish cinema’s most distinctive critical triumphs over the last 20 years, delivers once again – this time co-directing with Pol Rodriguez. A thinly-disguised study of a couple of troubled years during the 1990s for one of Spain’s biggest indie bands, Los Planetas, the edgy, dreamy and fragmented Saturn takes the raw facts and creates something that’s both very watchable and artistically satisfying.

Very watchable and artistically satisfying

While the film is grounded in the culture of the band’s hometown of Granada, its multiple virtues mean it could travel beyond a domestic audience, a trajectory that may be helped by its Malaga awards for best Spanish film, best director and editing at its world premiere.

It’s the mid-1990s, and Los Planetas, an indie band from Granada with a line in sweet melodies, grungy guitars, defiant amateurishness, and darkly introspective lyrics – the Velvet Underground and Joy Division are claimed as influences – are going through a crisis. Their first album has been a success but the second less so; their record label is demanding a return to form. 

But bassist May (Stephanie Magnin) has decided to leave both her boyfriend, the Singer (Dani Ibanez), and the band to return to university; they need a new drummer; and while the Singer is going through an artistic crisis, his best friend the Guitarist (Cristalino) is self-harming, doing too many drugs and generally being the wayward rock star. (The script chooses to give the band members these abstract names rather than use the names of the real members of Los Planetas, but fans will know exactly who is being referred to. ) The band’s dream is to go to New York to record, but the record label won’t put up the cash. It is giving nothing away to say that Los Planetas eventually get there and that the resulting album, 1998’s ‘A Week Inside the Engine of a Bus’, is a Spanish indie music classic.

Despite the initial onscreen warning that this will be a film not about Los Planetas but their legend, this is the kind of rock band yarn that has been told many times.  The interest lies in what Lacuesta and Rodriguez do with it, and they take the story apart and put it back into something fragmented, dream-like, and compelling. The band members each recount in voiceover their own memories of things, each challenging the truth of the others’ memories. Scenes from past, present and future collide and echo; there is visual poetry, but it never feels strained.

As individual characters, however, they are not particularly interesting or nuanced, and they do not take particularly interesting journeys – though they are, winsomely enough, in a permanent state of shambolic dislocation. The Singer is fundamentally an egotist whose only conversations, as May points out, are with himself; and the reasons behind The Guitarist’s drive to self-destruction are not really explored, dampening our sympathies. The real focus is the on-off relationship between the pair, which gives the film its structure: perhaps first and foremost Saturn Return is a film about friendship, about a mutual dependency that at times crosses over into the homoerotic.

Granada, one character tells us, is the only Spanish city with the name of an explosive (‘Granada’ means ‘grenade’). But for the viewer, the contrast between this ancient and seemingly non-explosive town, with its narrow streets and tumbledown atmospherics, always feels like a strange contrast with the edgy modernity of the band’s music. One striking scene has them looking up in awe at a Christ during the town’s Easter processions, giving the sense they are simultaneously trying to escape from, and in thrall to, the weight of the city’s traditions.

Lovers of Spanish culture will enjoy the way that Lacuesta’s script, co-written with Fernando Navarro, finds space for little homages to Granada, whether via the poet Federico García Lorca – another artist who dreamed of New York – or the flamenco singer and rival Enrique Morente, whose rock/flamenco fusion masterpiece ‘Omega’ hangs heavy over the band’s development.

The cast are actual musicians from Granada, which means the rehearsal sessions feel very authentic – and there are a lot of them, which Planetas fans will enjoy watching. Indeed, even for a rock homage film like this one, there is a lot of the band’s music, which newcomers are likely to eventually find a bit samey – even though you do get the strongest possible sense of where those dark lyrics are actually coming from. D.P. Takuro Takeuchi’s camerawork is as restless and fluid as the film’s general style, signaling the sense of disquiet and anxiety that is the film’s tonal hallmark.

Tragically, the main reason for Lacuesta working alongside Rodriguez is that he largely had to direct the film remotely, from the hospital where his daughter Luna died of leukemia several months ago. Saturn Return is dedicated to her.