Cigarette ash piles up on top of a few discarded CDs inside a dark room as members of the rock band Los Planetas struggle to compose tracks for their new album. This short shot conveys more than just the chaos of space. These potentially devastating discs symbolize a certain anarchic disregard for music as it exists in its contained, marketable, and profitable form. For this group, music is only important as long as it flows from their not-so-hidden inner wounds and is shaped by the influence of drugs and the fierce dynamic between them. It’s the chaos — both visible and hidden in their minds — that fuels the songs themselves.
The astonishing achievement of directors Isaki Lacusa and Paul Rodriguez in “Saturn Return” is how they cinematically conjure that creative and personal turmoil intertwined with frenetic visual energy and formal audacity, and refuses to succumb to any sub-conventions. From that intoxicating artistic spirit emerges one of the most honest and invigorating music biographies in years, a work as uninterested in sanitizing the image of its deeply flawed subjects as it engages viewers in their destructive, poetic, and ultimately redemptive battle against their worst impulses.
Although it has a brush with fantasy, the filmmakers keep the characters’ feet (mostly) glued to the ground, living out the real horror they created. As linear as it takes viewers from the time of great fantasy to a recording session in New York City in the late 1990s, “Saturn” is not an origin story at all. Providing background information may make the experience richer, but arriving without seeing the party, without context about who Los Planetas is, will not get in the way of how its atmosphere envelops you.
Built from an assortment of vivid vignettes, nightmares and rehearsals (or from “500 pieces” as one of the group’s songs says), “Saturn” is a portrait of a musical act, or more accurately of a three-way friendship. They die by thousands of wounds as they face an uphill battle to repeat their previous success. The narrative, described not as a factual account but as a surrealist-tinged myth based on real people, finds the band after the triumph of their first album and the failure of their second. The next person must deliver, or they will be cut from their brand. The film’s Spanish-language title, “Segundo premio,” refers to the most important song on their third album, “Una semana en el motor de un autobús,” which miraculously pays off over the course of its running time.
No names were used for the pair of heroes. The credits list their names as the singer (Daniel Ibanez, who appeared alongside Javier Bardem in The Good Boss) and the guitarist (played by a real musician, whose stage name is Cristalino). The fire-glasses-wearing singer operates an elaborate facade of disinterest and emotional guardedness. Meanwhile, the heroin-addicted axeman’s erratic behavior reveals a psyche weaker under pressure. For Ibanez and Cristalino, who are acting for the first time, the arrangement is a long one. Their on-screen bond doesn’t rely on a lot of physical touch, or even less on conversation. There is an impenetrable barrier between them that makes it difficult to decipher their needs and motivations in this partnership. Their performances range from the rawness of their lives to the indifferent rock star aura that is inevitable for the individuals they play with.
To interject what the two can’t say to each other face to face, La Cuesta and co-writer Fernando Navarro provide voice-over narration from the first few frames. However, this element does not come from one source, but from all the main characters that mesh with the love/hate relationship between the main duo. With the utmost knowledge is May (Stephanie Magnin), the only character called by name and the third core member – a former guitarist – who exits Los Planetas right as the film begins. It talks about how the singer and guitarist unmistakably embodies their hometown of Granada. Although the cultural specificity of this may not resonate outside of Spain, one can understand the idea of the band reflecting the particularities of the city that raised them as people and artists.
Her observations as a woman who was romantically involved with both at the same time emphasize their male inability to express their feelings out loud unless they are veiled in sad songs. The words eventually appear on screen, the tracks emerging from the hazy darkness of the processing process — not just as subtitles but in the original Spanish as if the filmmakers had created the film as a lyric. Regardless of who is speaking, the narrative apologetically states that these recreated events, which occurred in the twentieth century, belong to a reactionary time that was not as functioning as our modern reality. These multiple viewpoints acknowledge that some versions of events may involve lies, a playful self-awareness that animates every aspect of the film, from Takuro Takeuchi’s kinetic camerawork to the temporal collage of moments in the yet still fluid editing.
While the film chronicles the fraying relationship between the singer and guitarist, about whom we know nothing in terms of their past, “Saturn Return” uses the verses of their compositions as our only way in. They stand side by side with much to acknowledge and thank the other because, as if by a spell, their lips become sealed. Their sisterhood thrives on the intensity of their personalities and the hurt they carry — reasons we don’t know — and it seems like the only way they can show love is by tearing each other apart.
It all builds into a close-up shot towards the end, so unflinchingly beautiful that it will serve as the defining image of “Saturn Returns,” in which the ghostly forms of these two men are superimposed on each other, embodying the concept of friendship forming one shared soul. Divided into two bodies. There are no comforting embraces much less speeches, but in that one image, the directors assert that if they were able to make music at all, it was because they were making it for each other, each song a sonic gesture of their distorted exchange. , often toxic devotion to another.