Exaggerated letter to Hidrogenesse

Modesty is a tool, and when you write a film in which love and pain run rampant, you have to be afraid that the result will be strangled by sentimentality. It reassured me to know that love and pain would share space with the mystery from other worlds , with the fear of seeing a street blocked by a lack of information and the desire (this is important) to return to dull normality with the person I loved, instead of wanting to relive a honeymoon. It also reassured me to know in advance that, during the first scene, where that ideal of a couple's routine was fulfilled in the form of a walk through the city center, "The Kiss " by Hidrogenesse was playing. A song whose lyrics I couldn't appropriate (it's an invocation of the late Alan Turing ), but which always seemed to me to be overflowing with emotion, not following any of the paths of love songs, but rather in the form of an electronic spell projected against a certain celestial vault.

Modesty is an obstacle, and although Genís Segarra and Carlos Ballesteros have seemed unattainable to me for so many years in so many ways, I am so glad I dared to ask them for much more than a song, to cover the entire film with the same delicacy and sense of beauty, and thus suddenly free me from all the curses that threaten traditional soundtracks. Since they are a fetish, I also had the nerve to ask them to be an object within the film and to play for all of us (those present at the shoot and the fictional characters) Escolta la tempesta , another prodigious song from which, this time, I could steal the lyrics, transforming it, without changing a comma, into a large part of what we wanted to tell with this film.

The modesty of others is a mystery, and one day I received the wonderful news that Beatrice Grannó , the Italian singer who, as it happens, stars in Daniela Forever , and Hidrogenesse were going to meet one afternoon in Rome to record a version of that same song as the closing song for the film and the soundtrack album they've just released on their record label, Austrohúngaro. The result is a beautiful personal revenge. If I wanted to make this song my own, now it's the one that's taken ownership of me forever. Of the memory of all the joys and all the uncertainties that this film brought me. Of all the love and sadness that inspired and imbued it. I will never listen to it without being stabbed right down my middle by the pride and pleasure of having worked with Carlos and Genís . And the stupor of having given me a place in their story, which has long been legendary.