Something Is About to Happen movie storyline. Lucia lives an uneventful life as an IT specialist in Madrid. When the company goes bankrupt due to embezzlement, she decides to make a radical change in her life and become a taxi driver.
In the taxi, she meets a series of colorful people, including Roberta, a theatre producer with whom she forms a great friendship, and Ricardo, a journalist who hits on her at the slightest opportunity. Yet, Lucía secretly hopes that, one day, Braulio, an actor with whom she had a fleeting fling and to whom she owes her obsession with the Turandot aria “Nessun Dorma”, will jump in her taxi and finally become her prince charming. But reality can be stubborn and people might not really be who they seem to be.
Something Is About to Happen (Spanish: Que Nadie Duerma) is a 2023 Spanish-Romanian thriller drama film directed by Antonio Méndez Esparza from a screenplay by Méndez Esparza and Clara Roquet based on Juan José Millás’ novel. It stars Malena Alterio alongside Aitana Sánchez-Gijón. The film world premiered at the 68th Valladolid International Film Festival (Seminci) on October 22, 2023. Distributed by Wanda Visión, it was released theatrically in Spain on November 17, 2023.
Film Review for Something Is About to Happen
Based in the United States, filmmaker and teacher Antonio Méndez Esparta made headlines when his first film, Aquí y Allá: Here and There, won the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prix, and his second film, Life and Nothing More, won the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award in 2017.
Always placed in the aftermath of reality and filming his previous works in America, he has finally shot in Spain (and in Spanish). Something Is About to Happen brings to the screen the novel of the same name by Juan José Millás, starring Malena Alterio and Aitana Sánchez Gijón and premiered worldwide in the official section of the 68th Seminci – Valladolid International Film Week.
Both book and feature film portray Lucía, a mature woman who, abruptly and due to the incompetence of her superiors, loses her job as an IT specialist at a dental company. So the time has come to reinvent herself and, without losing her natural charm, she starts working as a taxi driver, travelling the streets and picking up customers, while flirting with her upstairs neighbour, who is fond of listening to Puccini’s opera Turandot (an aria from the final act of this opera gives the film and the novel their title).
Spurred on by her imagination and dressed as the mythical daughter of the Chinese emperor, this Travis Bickle from the less photogenic neighbourhoods of Madrid will start to meet new people who get into her vehicle. Among them, a writer and a theatre producer, with whom she maintains relations outside the vehicle, mixing pleasure with business, hopes and dreams, and above all commitment and passion, because for her “love is the world’s fuel”.
Something Is About to Happen is therefore driven between what the central character does and what she imagines, what she lives, feels, thinks and carries with her personally and familiarly. With full support from Alterio, its main actress, the film follows in the wake of the literary and meta-fictional games of Millás’ writings, jumping from reality to fiction and even questioning the work of the writer, that insatiable and cruel vampire of other people’s lives and fabricator of utopias.
Something Is About to Happen is not satisfied with moving through one narrative plane (what is real and what is fiction in the head of its central character, this modern and motorised Doña Quijote?), but, as if affected by (cinematic) dysphoria, it slips between comedy and drama, mystery and strangeness, urban road movie and revenge film, in such a way that it is hard to define this feature film as a single genre. It jumps from one to the other until it mutates into an undefined, unexpected and slightly disconcerting film.
Something Is About to Happen (2023)
Que Nadie Duerma
Directed by: Antonio Méndez Esparza
Starring: Malena Alterio, Aitana Sánchez Gijón, Rodrigo Poisón, José Luis Torrijo, Manuel de Blas, Mariona Ribas, Mariano Llorente, Íñigo de la Iglesia, Federico Pérez Rey, Natalia Vallés
Screenplay by: Antonio Méndez Esparza, Clara Roquet
Cinematography by: Barbu Balasoiu
Film Editing by: Marta Velasco
Costume Design by: Clara Bilbao
Art Direction by: Lorena Puerto
Music by: Zeltia Montes
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Aquí y Allí Films (Spain), Movies Inspired (Italy)
Release Date: November 17, 2023 (Spain), April 7, 2024 (United States)
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