Denis (Adam Prieto) is a handsome, heavily tattooed and unexpectedly timid young man living in Galicia, Northwestern Spain. He loves rock music, regularly attends gigs and plays in a small band. One day, a group of friends drag him into a burglary. The young people break into a large and posh mansion, listen to loud music, drink, smoke, smash objects and steal the large flatscreen television. The hesitant criminal ends up intoxicated with alcohol and crashes in one of the bedrooms. Fifty-year-old Bea (Mara Sánchez) gets home a few hours later and is shocked to find the place thrashed, and the unconscious stranger. She hits Denis’s face with an object and he flees, with a nosebleed. To Bea’s surprise, he returns briefly after, with the stolen television on his arms.
The two strangers bond. They are both very lonely people. Denis broke up with his only girlfriend ever and dreams of moving to Berlin, but his earnings as labourer at the Vigo port are very meagre. Bea separated from her husband Alfonso six months earlier, and the have been trying to sell the house since. She has a daughter roughly of the same age of Denis, but her only child isn’t particularly concerned about her mother feelings (she’s just annoyed that the divorce her thrown a spanner into some of her plans). And both characters have hormone problems: Bea is on her menopause, while Denis has had to take testosterone since he transitioned. The knowledge that the male is trans neither puzzles nor daunts Bea.
A tender love story follows, in a simple and austere film set mostly inside the house where the two lovebirds first met. Denis’s ingenuousness is moving, at times even funny. He asks to borrow a shirt and to brush his teeth before leaving the house he burgled. He forces himself into a surprise encounter with Alfonso and the daughter. The outcome is awkward at first, before Denis successfully circumvents any potential embarrassment. To Denis’s enchantment, Bea too is deeply connected to music. And she becomes curious about his artistic skills.
It isn’t clear whether Pietro a trans actor, or whether Fazáns resorted to transface (a practice guaranteed to ruffle some feathers in parts of the LGBT+ community and the identity movement). While Almodovar found the perfect excuse to have a cis actor play a trans character in The Law of Desire (1987): he also got a trans actor to play a cis character. It’s not clear whether the Galician filmmaker had such a subversive and compelling reason here. I’m not a purist, and so I’d like to compliment Prieto for their performance, whatever their gender assigned at birth. He’s truly magnetic, with a quiet and genuine smile, and a latent joie-de-vivre. Sánchez too is very good in the role of a woman who became caught in the rut of career and middle age, and saw suddenly saw an escape route leading directly back into her rebellious youth.
Entirely spoken in Galician language, The Dashed Line is also a tribute to Galician rock, a region of Spain more commonly associated with Celtic heritage and bagpipes (particularly Carlos Nunez, the piper behind the soundtrack of Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside, from 2004). The entirely diegetic soundtrack (in other words: the characters listen to the songs) is infused with the perfect balance of joy and nostalgia. A pleasant movie to watch – much like listening to an old vinyl by your long-forgotten rock favourite.
The Dashed Lines premiered in the Official Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where this piece was originally written. Also showing at REC Tarragona.
