Amaia (Laia Costa, who is still best remembered for her starring role in the iconic German crime film “Victoria”) has just given birth, but she doesn’t seem very happy. Although both she and her partner Javi (Mikel Bustamente) are around 35 years old, it would be hard to say that they have settled lives, at least not in the way her parents, Begona (Susi Sanchez) and Koldo (Ramon Barea) imagined a settled life. who came from a coastal town in the Basque Country to help their daughter during those first few days. Javi is a lighting master in the theater and is almost never at home, so he will take the first opportunity and go on tour for a few weeks, leaving his partner and newly born daughter alone.
Amaia, on the other hand, works as a copywriter for a foreign agency, but due to the obligations of motherhood, she will not have time for anything at all. She is completely sleepless, broken, lost, desperate and will decide to seek refuge with her daughter in her parents’ house, but we will understand that the situation there is not exactly ideal either. Amaia will realize some things between mom and dad that she didn’t notice before, and returning home, to the home where she grew up, will lead her to reflect on what it looked like back then. Will she be a different mother to her daughter compared to her own mother.
Basque debutante Alauda Ruiz de Azua presented herself at the Berlin festival with this artistic and well-thought-out drama, and stylistically in “Lullaby” or “Cinco Lobitos” she follows the style of the Japanese Hirokazu Koreeda or even Yasujiro Ozu. It is a film that follows the daily life of this family in a realistic way, almost like a docudrama, and although time may seem to stand still, we understand that this film still covered a longer period of time. In recent years, we have really been able to see films about motherhood, and one of the freshest examples is Almodovar’s “Parallel Mothers”. However, Ruiz de Azua takes a completely different path in her film, and in the foreground is now a woman who must learn and adapt to a completely new role in life.
Probably even Amaia herself could not have been aware of how much her life would change once she became a mother and what was waiting for her. And while it’s normal for her boyfriend to come and go all the time, she is the one who has to be there all the time and who is expected to completely submit to this new role and be available to the newborn 24 hours a day. “Lullaby” is a film that also stands out for its quality acting performances, not only by Costa as a young mother, but also by the experienced theater actress Susi Sanches, who is remembered for her episodic roles in numerous Almodovar films. The dynamic of the relationship between mother and daughter is particularly interesting here, and the characters are well-developed and well-rounded, and “Lullaby” was an interesting, moving and high-quality film.