Marina has been working for years lending her skills to obstetrician and gynecologist for Doctors Without Borders, in missions that care for the needy in Africa. The woman is happily engaged to her colleague Mathias, even though on many occasions they are busy in different areas of the Black Continent. One day Marina performs an emergency caesarean section on a patient, who dies shortly after giving birth, and becomes incredibly fond of the newborn baby.
But in Lemon bread with poppy seeds the protagonist has a more urgent concern to take care of. One day she in fact discovers that she and her older sister Anna have received a bakery as an inheritance by someone whose identity they do not know and who must return to his native community of Valldemossa, in Mallorca, to finalize the sale. reunion between the two sisters it’s not the best, also because in the meantime a financial issue relating to the family home comes between them, but when Anna returns from a medical check-up with a shocking result, they will find a way to reunite…
Lemon bread flavor with poppy seeds
A kind of soap opera in cinematic formwith a two-hour duration in which a multiplicity of assorted (melo)dramas are condensed: from the theme of adoption to that of the illness that devastates even the happiest families, Lemon bread with poppy seeds he makes no concessions in trying to excite the audience on several occasions, with a series of complicated vicissitudes that characterize the newfound bond between the two protagonists. Compared to similar serial productions, the operation benefits from undoubtedly top-notch direction superior: the director Benito Zambrano Furthermore, it boasts a very respectable career, including nominations for the Goya awards and participation in the Cannes festival, and even in the most static phases the film still has a certain personality. Likewise also the interpretations are well above average of the kind, with Elia Galera and Eva Martin who manage to instill the right torments in their respective characters.
Il Sarto, the review: a drama with excessively melodramatic atmospheres
A story with many voices
At the base there is a popular bestselling novel, also distributed in Italy, with the title of the same name, and the risk of signing an excessively saccharine transposition, in an attempt to intercept the widest possible target, was just around the corner. As mentioned, the risk was partially avoided, with therhetoric that at times becomes predominant but he never fully assimilates the story, despite looking for the easy tear here and there even in the management of the “surprising” twists that startle in the final half hour. Furthermore, Zambrano has always taken great care of female psychology throughout his filmography, just think of his dazzling debut Solas (1999) with which this film shares some similarities in one of the various subplots, and here too manages to manage with its male gaze an incisive feminist approach at the right point.
A bit of everything’
The major “flaw” lies more than anything else precisely in the narrative and therefore in the underlying book, or rather in its attempt to mix different topics in a blatantly unfortunate perspective, which pushes the various protagonists adrift, some enlightened by a potential new beginning, others encountering the cruelty of a fate that doesn’t look anything or anyone in the face. The discussion onemancipation mixes with that of integrationin a choral story where women represent the alpha and omega, with men as secondary if not downright repelling elements: after all, the pen behind the novel is that of Cristina Camposwho put her experience in the world of cinema as a casting director in the narrative management of a work that seemed designed, already in its basic dynamics, for a future live-action transposition.
Lemon bread with poppy seeds it therefore has several strings to its bow but in its emphasis on the centrality of the topics exposed in the review phase it is also very divisivedrawing a clear line of demarcation on the type of spectator to be addressed.
Conclusions
Two sisters separated for a long time find each other again after many years due to a mysterious inheritance. Monica is a doctor who works for Doctors Without Borders in the most troubled areas of Africa; Anna is unhappily married and the mother of a teenage girl. A shocking discovery will strengthen that broken relationship… Adapted from the novel of the same name by Cristina Campos, Lemon Bread with Poppy Seeds is a modern melodrama that is redolent of its tragedy and difficult situations placed before the tormented protagonists, each struggling with a destiny that will put them face to face with crucial choices and immense and imminent tragedies. The soap-opera narrative finds an unexpected counterpoint in solid, precise direction and a capable cast, for a film which, with greater balance, could have provided less forced and insistent emotions than they appear here.
Because we like it
- The protagonists Elia Galera and Eva Martín.
- The direction is solid even in the most rhetorical passages.
What’s wrong
- The screenplay, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, overdoes the melodramatic elements.
- Forces here and there in a plot that means too much in too little.
