La Voz de Galicia – October 21, 2022 →
I wanted to watch something that was gentle, entertaining, and without violence; something that would not make me think too much, but that wouldn’t make me feel as if I were wasting my time, either. And somehow I got to the made-for-TV adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, a European co-production of Jules Verne homonymous work with a few (or should I say, many) licenses taken. The thing is that in this version, the vital journey of the characters made me reflect about what it means to learn from life, to learn to course-correct; but also on the idea that, whether we want to or not, we are all broken in some way. We all have a crack, a scar, something heavy we carry on our shoulders, something we regret…And sometimes that crack may make us stronger or more sensitive, but it can also end us. It all depends on the way it catches us at any given moment when it takes over, whether we need or not a possible remedy, and whether or not we have access to it.
Curiously, some days ago, Xan took me to see a retrospective of the New York photographer Diane Arbus, a pioneer in the idea of celebrating the beauty of diversity and turning it into art, and a pioneer in the normalization of complex–and in many cases invisible–lives. But also an artist harshly criticized at the moment, perhaps because she was not understood or because her intimate nearness to realities that were not her own was not accepted. Her work moves me profoundly and has always made me think about the importance of the artist’s point of view in art because when they interpret the world from the perspective of their own brokenness, it makes us see our own fissures in theirs, and in some way, helps us live with them…
