I gotta say I really love José Luis Garci's movies - this is the second one I've seen and they have such a beautiful quiet way about them. I have personal reasons for being moved by Sesión Continua in particular, but that's because the film is a kind of meditation on living through work or avoiding living through working. And then... the plot of the film the director and screenwriter are making is about falling in love with someone much younger and being inspired by the youth of one's beloved. (This was a film, incidentally, that Natey, a guy I was dating last summer, had planned to watch with me when he got home from Spain in the fall – before we stopped seeing one another.)This is all subtle and comic while at the same time managing to be poignant. It's a kind of particularity of Garci's movies that they can be broadly funny, even farcical, while also being sad or bittersweet – sometimes even in the same scene – as when a scene begins with the writer and director discussing plot points at an outdoor café and it sounds to a terrified innocent patron like they're plotting a kidnapping, but as the scene ends we hear the director muse about how his daughter is having an affair with an older man and how that makes him reflect on his own age.
The real star here is José Bódalo who gives an absolutely brilliant performance as the head of the film studio. He is ill the whole movie – probably prostate cancer – but his own illness is a kind of red herring for what Garci's film really has in store. But, man, Sesión Continua is so good. This is an excellent follow up to Volver a Empezar.
This film wasn't released in theatres in the US and has never appeared on DVD. I watched Sesión Continua via the Cave of Forgotten Films website here.
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