From top to Basque – Liberation

Having benefited from a digital restoration (at the good care of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna), Tasio is a real curiosity emerging from the limbo of Spanish cinema in the 80s, very far from the Movida spirit which in these same years propels a certain Pedro Almodóvar at the forefront of a queer fantasy (Tasio date of 1984, date of What did I do to deserve this ? of the Madrid director). Signed by the Basque Montxo Armendáriz, ex-engineer and professor of electronics, the film is the evocation of a rural past, of a rustic village existence through a male figure, recalcitrant to any form of evolution or modernity. Tasio, in fact, that we discover a child and that we follow until mature age, left school very early on to indulge in the traditional activity of charcoal burners in the forest, the wood cooked slowly in grounds of land and leaves named Txondorra. Careful practice and which he is trying to perpetuate, refusing to accompany his best friend to the city when he resolves to find work at the factory or under construction. The character braconne as a lost in the forest to eat or benefit from the resale of furs. Many scenes consist of looting chicks in the nests, trapping small animals all cute or discharge with the rifle of deer or wild boars.

The whole film is quite strange because it is watched less as a classic potential than it was urgent to reassess than as a period document on the end of a world, the dozen villages having served as sets and provided the team in various peasant accessories having probably in the years which followed the accelerated shooting their inexorable mutation in residential areas for holidays with the big strokes with its restored stone houses. The stubbornness of the hero in his sedentary lifestyle and his desire for independence draws a out-of-phase destiny which is difficult to know if it is thus perceived by the director, himself trapped in a pious image of popular pride. The film is beautiful nevertheless by the isolation of which it testifies and the artistic solitude which ultimately falls to him.