To call this film brilliant would be an understatement.
Few films come out nowadays which attempt to breach the boundaries of the status quo and explore the idea of radical, new filmmaking.
Solitary Fragments is one of those films. And it inspires on so many levels. It is a film which excels in subtlety and uses this subtlety to evoke strong, deep emotion out of its viewers.
The plot follows two parallel storylines which share nothing more than a relationship between three characters that live together. The first storyline is that of a woman, Adela, who leaves her small town life to forget her past and to forge a new future in Madrid with her one-year old son. The second is that of Ines and her family and the strong, but tense relationship they all share. Tragedy strikes twice through out the film, once on each storyline, and the characters are forced to pick up the pieces in order to move on with their lives.
The film is a feat in storytelling. It prides itself on the ability to set aside acting in favor of true emotion and real dialogue using silence, awkwardness, joy, sadness. I'm not sure I've ever seen a film where I felt like I was sitting in the living room with the characters and sharing their emotions as if I were talking to them directly. Solitary Fragments accomplishes this better than any film I've seen.
And the basic storytelling is only a small part of it. It's hard to ignore the many technical innovations the director and editor chose to employ to tell the story further. The use of multiple cameras to film a single scene and to cut them together simultaneously and splitting the screen was really incredible. I've never seen anything like it. There wasn't a single moment of music. Silence was the film's score. Finally, there wasn't a single tracking shot or pan throughout the entire film. The cameras were always stationary (with the exception of the POV shots from within the vehicles, where the vehicles moved, but the camera was still stationary). Every shot was filmed from a stationary camera and the characters moved in and out of the frame. I've never seen anything like it before.
It's a film I can only watch once for a myriad of reasons. But it only takes one viewing to fully appreciate the enormity of such a film.