The Beloved

 

Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. 

George Orwell 

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s films often begin when we still do not quite know what is happening, yet already sense that something could spiral out of control. In Madre, a telephone conversation gradually turned into an unbearable situation. In El ser querido, two people sitting at a restaurant table generate an almost physical tension through the most ordinary words, the same palpable tension found in As Bestas. 

At first, we do not really know who the man and woman before us are, what story connects them, or what remains between them after so much time. The dialogue advances through approaches and retreats, small courtesies, hesitations, questions that seem harmless and answers that are anything but. The camera progressively tightens the space, moves closer to their faces and registers the slightest changes in expression. We do not need music to warn us of danger: the way one looks at the other, the time taken to answer, what is said and, above all, what cannot find a possible formulation are enough. 

The scene lasts around twenty minutes and has the precision of a narrative mechanism activating before our eyes. Sorogoyen chose not to have the two performers rehearse their encounter together beforehand, seeking a degree of genuine unpredictability in their reactions. The result is an opening that does more than introduce the characters: it immediately puts them under pressure, and does the same to the spectator, deprived of the reassuring distance of someone who already knows how to interpret what they are seeing. 

When we discover the relationship between them, the dialogue takes on a different meaning in retrospect. The hesitations become symptoms of a lost familiarity; the courtesies become attempts to contain a story that continues to press beneath the surface. Esteban is a famous director, a man who has travelled the world and accumulated accolades. Emilia is an actress trying to establish herself. But the decisive difference between them has nothing to do with success: it concerns the way each carries the past. 

There is an apparently incidental scene that condenses this imbalance with an almost administrative cruelty. Emilia searches online for information about her father’s life and discovers his public biography: his career, his wife, the children from his new family. There is no trace of herself. The man the world knows so well has built a life in which his daughter seems never to have existed. No one needs to tell her she has been excluded: it is enough for the screen to reveal the geography of an absence. 

The web, a potentially boundless archive of contemporary identities, becomes here a place of erasure. Esteban’s biography is full, documented, recognisable; in the story his father makes available to the world, Emilia’s is a blank page. His fame has not merely accompanied the abandonment: it has made it possible to construct a narrative in which that abandonment does not appear. And this is precisely the subtlest form of violence, because it consists not only in having been abandoned, but in finding oneself excluded even from the narrative of the person who abandoned us. 

The title, El Ser Querido, already contains an ambiguity that the film is in no hurry to resolve. Being loved does not necessarily mean being recognised; being important to someone does not mean that person knows how to see who we are. Esteban wants to reconnect with his daughter, but seems to imagine that cinema can accomplish what his presence has failed to achieve. He offers her a role, an opportunity, a part in his own work. It is a concrete offer, seemingly generous even, and yet it preserves an ambiguity: the father assigns her a place in the film before managing to acknowledge her place in his own story. 

Sorogoyen does not reduce Esteban to the easily condemned figure of the absent parent. Javier Bardem gives him an imposing, contradictory presence, capable of shifting from charm to bullying without any clear break. His character is not devoid of affection; rather, he seems to know only forms of relating in which he retains control. He may sincerely wish to win his daughter back and, at the same time, be incapable of enduring what she reflects back to him about himself. His tragedy lies not in being entirely unaware of the harm he has caused, but in being unable to look at it without turning it into something else: a weakness in the past, a circumstance, a consequence of his own unhappiness. 

This is where the film finds its most compelling material. Esteban directs actors, chooses shots, corrects performances and repeats scenes until they match his vision. The set is a hierarchical environment in which the director’s will can be legitimised through the language of artistic excellence. But what happens when the pursuit of perfection becomes a licence to dominate; when the needs of the film justify disregarding another person’s boundaries… 

The answer comes in one of the story’s most violent sequences: Esteban insists on repeating a scene, escalating the tension. The production machine keeps running as the work turns into abuse. It is no longer possible to distinguish professional discipline from the aggression of the man imposing it. What the director considers a performance problem becomes a question of power; what he wants to correct in the actor reveals what he cannot correct in himself. His inability to recognise a limit is not an incident external to the creative process: it is embedded in the way he understands his own role. 

The scene is all the more significant because the film within the film, Desierto, tells the story of Spanish colonial rule in Western Sahara. The relationship between these two levels is neither a simple symbolic correspondence nor a mechanical overlap between private and political violence. It is something more precise: in both cases, the question is the right of those who hold power to impose their own version of reality, deciding how others should appear, what place they should occupy and to what extent they are allowed to resist the will of whoever directs them. 

Colonialism thus enters the very structure of the film, through a story concerned with the control of a territory and the people who inhabit it. Film production becomes the place where the representation of that domination risks reproducing its mechanisms: the director gives orders, the others carry them out; his vision determines what must be shown, while the human cost of the process tends to disappear behind the result. Violence does not need to declare itself as such when it can present itself as necessity, method or rigour. 

Esteban’s contradiction is also that of a form of power capable of recognising itself when it sees it elsewhere. The director understands the violence of the colonisation of Western Sahara and goes so far as to defend a population’s right to self-determination, free from the domination of those who presume to organise its life. But this clarity stops short when he faces his daughter. It is as though a parent, capable of recognising the occupation of a territory, cannot see how his own presence might become a form of occupation of another person’s existence. For bringing a child into the world also means establishing, before they can choose, some of the conditions within which they will learn to desire, judge themselves and recognise who they are. The problem is not transmission itself, but the claim to determine its meaning unilaterally, turning inheritance into destiny and love into a title of ownership. Esteban can recognise a people’s right not to be governed by others, but cannot accept that his daughter has the right to free herself from his version of their story. Family colonisation perhaps begins precisely here: when someone who has helped shape an identity also claims the right to retain control over it. 

But Sorogoyen is not content merely to denounce an authoritarian man. He also wants to show how fragile the boundary is between the person we believe ourselves to be and the person who emerges when circumstances strip away our justifications. Esteban can tell himself that he has changed, can regard his past as a closed chapter; the set confronts him with a less accommodating reality. When he loses control, cinema does not create his aggression: it makes it visible, magnifies it and prevents it from being dismissed as a distant memory. 

The contrast between colour and black and white helps keep the relationship between the different levels of representation open. We are not simply facing reality opposed to fiction, as though the former were authentic and the latter an artifice. Life itself is made up of images we edit together, memories we select and versions we hand over to others. Cinema, by contrast, can become the instrument that interrupts this private editing process, revealing a continuity we would rather not see. 

The film thus moves from the conflict between a father and a daughter to a broader question: how much are we willing to learn about ourselves when knowledge requires us to relinquish the image that has allowed us to survive? Esteban’s past, also marked by his relationship with his own father, offers a possible genealogy of his violence. But genealogy is not absolution. Being hurt can explain how one learns to hurt others; it does not erase what one has done to those who came after. 

Emilia is not responsible for completing her father’s journey towards self-awareness, nor for turning her own suffering into an opportunity for his redemption. Her presence in the film introduces an essential form of resistance: that of someone who refuses to accept that the author of her story is also the only person entitled to tell it. The daughter does not merely want to be loved, if love is understood as the feeling her father claims to have for her. She wants that love not to be used to evade responsibility. She wants her father to acknowledge not only what he himself has felt, but also what he has caused to happen in her life. 

Like Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, El Ser Querido explores the power of family history in shaping individual identity and the difficulty of recognising the violence we inherit and pass on, especially when we are unable to question our own self-image. 

The strength of El Ser Querido lies in its refusal to present this recognition as an easy achievement, or to confuse vulnerability with moral transformation. Sorogoyen constructs a drama that unfolds through tensions, shifts and sudden ruptures, making cinema simultaneously a language, a profession and a possible form of self-deception. His direction is compelling because it denies the spectator an entirely secure vantage point: it draws us closer to the characters, then changes the meaning of what we have seen; it leads us to seek an explanation and immediately reveals how insufficient that explanation is. 

Esteban knows how to construct images that convince the world. The problem begins when he has to look at the image that concerns him. And cinema, which throughout his life has allowed him to organise what is visible, becomes the place where his own image slips beyond his control. 

Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers. 

François de La Rochefoucauld