I attended the film shoot on
several occasions [...] In this modern and chaotic city of Valencia
there was a tangled network of cables and spotlights under which
the ghosts of my adolescent days walked; girls wearing fake angora
cardigans, students, whores, priests, soldiers, bourgeois artisans,
professors and orphans who synthesized the Mediterranean passions
in the 1950s. Film director García Sánchez and scriptwriter Rafael
Azcona are two born narrators who don't beat around the bush. I
only asked them to spare me the typical Valencia fare: the paella,
fireworks, the crackers and the bitter baroque-like accessories.
The only thing that my novel and my own passion want to reflect is
the basic and submerged Valencia that exudes sensuality and is
natural, pleasant and morbid - something which is also common in
Sicily Naples, Greece and the Oran of Albert Camus. The result has
been excellent: here we have a film full of feelings, poetry and
melancholy that tells the short story of a literary vocation, the
discovery of the senses, cruelty and pleasures; the tram is just a
metaphor. During a short tram ride to the beach of Malvarrosa, back
in those days in Valencia, any teenager's heart could explode.
MANUEL VICENT