On Wednesday, the Greek Costa-Gavras, 91, was in Donostia-San Sebastián, presenting his new work and giving him the rank with Le dernier souffle; and on Thursday the British Mike Leigh, with an elegant black cane and 81 year old luggage. New old man? No. And I'm not saying there hasn't been a young director in the Official Section. It is to be applauded how directors from 30 to 40 years of age work, how they are disseminating more recent speeches. What I mean is that the two elders we had tenants in Donostia have not been outdated. They have been calm talking about mental health and, even if it is in vain, patriarchy.

Well, Zinemaldia is ending. Sixteen films from the Official Section compete for the Golden Shell, and on Thursday morning we were able to see the last two films from the list: Hard Truhs and The Last Showgirl (The Last Dantzari de cabaret). The British has been the first, the American has been the second. Both, both in English, have the woman as the protagonist in this week’s programme. From there, it is not possible to establish comparisons, as they are quite different.

At 81, British Mike Leigh leads a violent and interesting story. The film narrates the day-to-day life of a London working-class family living in London. The protagonist is the mother of the house, Pansy, more pepper than pepper, petrified and fed of life in general. It deals rudely with both those at home and those who cross the street. In this way, we will find scenes that make us laugh, such as when going to the dentist or when discussing with the supermarket worker or those in the queue.

But that roughness hides pain. He is burned, fed up with the same routine, having to devote so many hours to cleaning and suffering penalties, because he sees that his 22-year-old son has no friends and spends hours and hours glued to his cellphone, getting home, eating and drinking... The husband will try to reduce the situation, but the disability will prevail. Pansy finds refuge in her sister's house, starting from the middle of the film.

I've taken the look of On Falling, which means there's no big deal going on on the tape for almost a hundred minutes. The two films are two portraits of the current working class. The woman is the protagonist of both, not for the least, but indicative, and the spectacularity of the mobiles is noted both in On Falling and in Hard Truhts, as it is expressed as an instrument of extinction/distraction of the person. On Falling, the protagonist uses the phone a lot during the meal, as it does not match the roommates in the meals, and even takes it out of his pocket in the street to see pictures of Instagram, spend the time... In Hard Truhts, on the other hand, it is observed that the child does not know how to be without mobile and helmet headset, which has no social capacity to relate, or which is blocked, to the drift.

British actress Mariane Jean-Baptiste interprets Pansy as a protagonist. One of the most important keys to the quality of the film has been its work, and the director Leigh, in front of the press, in his outspoken and obsolete voice, has greatly appreciated his work: After rehearsing "many, many," he managed to "precisely spiral" create the character in perfection.

Leigh has handled the audience to his liking in the film. I've already said that we laughed a few paragraphs above, and it's been, but at the end of the movie, she realizes that that's what Leigh was looking for on purpose, that at first there were scenes to laugh, similar scenes, that then there would be silences. As we get to know Pansy, we will feel his pains closer. Just like in reality, same.

We will see how the jury in the Official Section values the film. Do not be surprised that Jean-Baptist had the award for the best actor there – in this edition we have seen many major players. In the United Kingdom, the film will premiere on January 31, and see when it reaches Euskal Herria. It's to be desired, to see.

In general, the last film presented in the Official Section competition was the one that liked the least: The Last Showgirl (The Last Dantzari de cabaret). This is the third feature of Gia Coppola, the granddaughter of the legendary Francis Ford Coppola, which, as can be read in the American press, is acquiring more and more skills, taking into account that he has already directed his first feature at the age of 23. It now has 37 fichajes, including Pamela Anderson, who has signed the Foral Police as the protagonist.

Anderson did not make a bad interpretation, and the story is not very small in itself, but it has not been made entirely concrete. The protagonist works in a cabaret room, but the premises are closed. The woman, 57 years old and 30 years old, is lost, because in the rest of the theater companies they will not hire her because of lack of talent and because she is "old". It will therefore be left with nothing. For some time she has not lived with her daughter; she has taken her away from life, because every night she had to go to work at the tavern. Now, as he reframes his life and looks for a new job, he tries to get his daughter back.

What it is to organize life around a job... I believe that Coppola deals with this issue in a cross-cutting way, but it seems to me that he has fallen short. Or it wasn't their intention, it's not their style, it's not their reality. I say this, and forgive me for returning to On Falling, but the Portuguese director Laura Carreira, who made that film, confessed at a press conference that many scenes that happen to the protagonist of the precarious work have happened in the first person. There are differences in these cases.

And a second point is that the causes of cabaret closure are purely economic, but perhaps we should also go further. And that is that, seeing the face that the daughter puts when she sees her mother's show, she comes to understand, or at least what the daughter has suggested is that these kinds of cabaret theaters, almost striptease, they have less and less space in society or at least they should have less. All this is washed in a two-second scene.

In part of all this, Gia Coppola has tried to put in a recovery phase the relationship between the protagonist dancer and her former partner, which is a cabaret commission. But the conversations seemed pretty weird to me. Hard to believe and unreasonable. Dave Bautista, the former partner, is given too much prominence and is not good for it; he is better at playing the roles of tramp and talking less, as in Dune.