Saturn Return

A rock n’ roll biopic in the tradition of Steven Shainberg’s Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, Saturn Return (aka Segundo Premio) is, co-director Isaki Lacuesta insists, definitely not a film about Granada-based nineties indie darlings Los Planetas – except that sometimes it obviously is. Like Shainberg, Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez draw on episodes in the life of their subject and on associated concepts as manifested in the popular imagination, building their own story around those. In the process, they test the boundaries of the rock biopic genre itself.

The film is Spain’s official submission to the 2025 Oscars, and unlikely as that may sound given the niche nature of the subject, it’s easy to see why the decision was made. The characters are not very distinct – a woman called May (Stéphanie Magnin) and her bandmates, who simply bear the names the Singer (Daniel Ibáñez) and the Guitarist (Cristalino) – and there’s not much to the plot, but the way it’s realised is remarkable. Takuro Takeuchi’s cinematography, with its frequent close-ups, use of blurring, beguiling shadows and blow-out blasts of light, plunges us into the heart of the action. We drift around parks, parties, clubs, gigs and the streets of Granada whilst familiar themes are extended and reworked, taken to poetic extremes.

The film’s three stars are all musicians themselves and this gives their interactions with their instruments a casual, naturalistic relationship with their instruments that few films of this sort achieve. This contrasts with the more formal staging of key scenes which define their relationships, though these also contribute to a sense of ambiguity, of flux. Taking her turn in a narration split three ways, May says of her bandmates that they could have fought to death or kissed to death depending on the night. This volatility drives much of the narrative, as does their apparent inability to communicate other than through music – and it’s complicated by the Guitarist’s increasing dependency on drugs.

Here the film becomes reflexively critical. Films about junkies often feature amazing hallucinations, the Guitarist proclaims, but in real life one is less likely to find oneself among Saturn’s rings and more likely to find oneself in a hole. This does not prevent him from experiencing a strange encounter with a young crocodile, one of many surrealistic elements which deliberately distort and reinvigorate the story. They slide in and out amongst the occluding fumes of smoke machines and constant cigarettes. Shades of brown, gold and burnt orange suffuse the film, but in a key scene, a character steps out of that carefully composed environment into daylight so overwhelming that for a moment we can barely see anything at all. The next thing we know, we’re in a swimming pool, that light scattered across splashes of water, the brief stillness transmuted into a burst of life.

The band’s dream of reinventing themselves, post-difficult second album, with a trip to New York City finds a parallel in the poetry of Federico García Lorca, who words emerge both directly and as images at key moments in the film. The sense of unfulfilled longing that permeated much of his work seems to speak not only to the frustrations of the characters but also to the plight of Rodriguez, who did most of his work remotely as he sat at the beside of his young daughter, Luna. She died of leukaemia. The film is dedicated to her memory. Rodriguez and Lacuesta’s creative achievement will ensure that he name is remembered for a long, long time.