La Reconquista: playful and melancholic (review)
The film of the meeting between Jonas Trueba and his favorite actress, the dazzling Itsaso Arano. A chronicle around the traces left by a first adolescent love, where sensoriality and cerebrality become one.
At 44, the Spaniard Jonas Trueba is entitled until February 10 to a complete retrospective of his work, at the joint initiative of the Center Pompidou and the Parisian cinema MK2 Bibliothèque. The opportunity to celebrate a filmmaker who, over the course of ten films, has particularly shone in the art of telling the story of the feeling of love, from first love at first sight to separation.
And at the same time, Arizona Distribution has the rich idea of releasing this unreleased film from 2015. A pivotal film in his work because that of his meeting with his star actress, the dazzling Itsaso Arano and the ideal gateway for those who have never seen anything of him before. Because we find there all the style of his cinema, this playful and melancholy way of telling the racing of the heart and his taste for long scenes of wandering in sequence shots where the silences and the looks say as much as the finely crafted exchanges between his main characters.
Their names are Manuela and Olmo. They meet again over a drink, after years of estrangement. And that evening, Manuela hands Olmo a letter that he wrote to her 15 years ago, when they were teenagers and experiencing their first love together.
The Reconquista then unfolded in two stages. First the night following this exchange where they decide, in a form of enchanted parenthesis, to live the future they had sworn to live and to check if the lost opportunities can be made up for. Then a flashback 15 earlier to see if the melancholy of the past has not embellished their memories.
And as in Linklater’s Before Sunrise trilogy, this way of dissecting the feeling of love, in a gesture where sensoriality and cerebrality become one, proves to be a pure delight.
By Jonas Trueba. With Itsaso Arano, Francesco Carril, Aura Garrido… Duration; 1h32. Released January 28, 2026
