Saturn Return movie storyline. A rock band has to record their third LP, the one that will make them either rise to stardom or fall into oblivion. Their idea, despite the reluctance of the executives, is for the recording to take place in NY. But everything gets complicated, and the creative process becomes hell.
Desertions of band members, sentimental breakups, rehearsals where drugs and alcohol run rampant, and the unbearable pressure of the record company are generating endless fights and arguments only alternated by small moments of happiness. Meanwhile, without knowing it, they will be composing an album that will mark a whole generation.
Saturn Return (Spanish: Segundo premio) is a 2024 musical drama film directed by Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez starring Daniel Ibáñez and Stéphanie Magnin. It is inspired by the story of the musical band Los Planetas.
Film distribution handled by BTeam Pictures in Spain and Capricci Films in France. Latido Films acquired international sales rights. The film was presented at the 27th Málaga Film Festival on 5 March 2024. It was also selected for screenings at the 14th D’A Film Festival Barcelona, the 25th Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI), and the 39th Guadalajara International Film Festival. It was released theatrically in Spain on May 24, 2024.
Fim Review for Saturn Return
“In all music band stories there is a lie. I’m not going to lie. It’s just that I do not remember”. The drummer speaks and it makes you want to make a t-shirt with that motto. There is more rock and roll there than in all those Stones or The Clash sweatshirts that H&M and Zara sell.
His voice is one of many that build the story of Second Prize, Isaki Lacuesta’s latest film co-directed with Pol Rodríguez, which returned from the Málaga Festival with the best merits. The bassist who left, the singer, the guitarist, the entire band tells the story in their own way, denying the others, contradicting themselves, cementing that legend that we read in the title of the film: “This is not a film about The Planets . It is a film about the legend of The Planets.”
Lacuesta, an expert in walking that fine wire between reality and fiction, builds here a band from Granada that plays the songs of Los Planetas, has its sense of humor, its own ghosts, the malafollá and, sometimes, even its instruments, but at the same time Maybe he lives a life that never existed, the life invented or imagined by us, the story of Los Planetas that, those of us who knew their songs by heart, wanted to see. And also listen, because Second Prize pampers and takes care of its music like few films in Spanish cinema, played live, produced as if it were a band concert.
Saturn Return is a very free, lysergic, psychedelic film. Drugs, so present in the group’s lyrics, are not just substance but form. It was only fair that the story of how A Week in the Engine of a Bus was composed – a druggy album if there ever was one, as well as one of the best of the band and of Spanish indie rock – was a story of junkies, of traveling on airplanes. abandoned, from fades to black that give chills, from overdoses of liters of water that are like Trainspotting but instead of swallowing the floor you levitate to the ceiling, all told with a camera that rises above the characters, that circles around them in circular currents. It is a film in which telepathy fits and Lorca is quoted looking at the sky, because it is also poetic in its own way.
At the same time, Segundo Premio is the chronicle of an era, a 24 Hour Party People with a Granada accent in which those who lived through the emergence of indie in Spain will be recognized. It is a portrait of a Granada that never existed. The 90s are vinyl in the record store, red and blue filters in the clubs, the Ground Floor where Los Planetas started playing, neon, glowing colors, lamps with curtains in the rehearsal room.
We would never have believed ourselves Second Prize if the actors who play the members of the band did not act with the truth that they possess. The work of everyone is commendable, the musicians who had never acted and the actors who never had a Granada accent. His reinterpretations of Jota, Florent, Eric, Banin and May make the legend even bigger. But whoever writes these lines feels a weakness for Cristalino, whose performance in full pause subterraneanly connects with the title of the Spanish cinema that left us with the most withdrawal symptoms at the end of the 70s. And that, by necessity, Los Planetas has to like.
Saturn Return (2024)
Segundo Premio
Directed by: Isaka Lacuesta
Starring: Daniel Ibáñez, Cristalino, Stéphanie Magnin, Mafo, Chesco Ruiz, Daniel Molina, Edu Rejón, David Alcalá Fraile, Julen Clarke, Jan Caplin, Carlos Caraballo, Lia Chapman, María Navarro Pareja
Screenplay by: Isaki Lacuesta, Fernando Navarro
Production Design by: Pepe Domínguez del Olmo
Cinematography by: Takuro Takeuchi
Film Editing by: Javi Frutos
Costume Design by: Lourdes Fuentes
Art Direction by: Gigia Pellegrini
Music by: Ylia
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: BTeam Pictures
Release Date: March 5, 2024 (Málaga), May 24, 2024 (Spain)
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