Ana is diagnosed with uterine cancer at the age of twenty-three. She decides not to tell her mother, her husband or her two daughters that she has two months to live at best. Two months or one hundred and six minutes of cinema; each one is lived intensely, nothing is insignificant, each gesture weighs, hurts, is its maximum expression. We remember that life is the only thing that is ours and that we only have agency over the present. The body’s discomfort reminds us that everything is physical, that living is a verb and therefore love is actions, affection is sensitive and everything important has a material support and is therefore finite. What can we leave behind? A few cassettes with our voice? What remains? The repetition of a gesture? The name our daughters will call when I am no longer here? Leaving a void is not easy if to exist is precisely to occupy a space; on earth, between the arms of a lover. Coixet makes us live one hundred and six minutes that overflow life itself in its simplicity and make it an inexhaustible experience. Life is fortuitous, like everything we get or lose. Like being able to watch this film in Cartagena wanting to control time, just like Ana does with her life, so that it doesn’t end because it is precious. However, the great virtue of movies and life, in the end, is that they do end.

Juan Pablo Melo