Flawed Fatherhoods in the Cinema of Jaime Rosales: The Father’s Unmet Gaze

Abstract

Since his beginnings, Jaime Rosales has directed seven feature films: The Hours of the Day (2003), Solitary Fragments (2007), Tiro en la cabeza (A Shot in the Head) (2008), Dream and Silence (2011), Beautiful Youth (2014), Petra (2018) and Wild Flowers (2022). In his films, the maternal-filial bond becomes the strongest factor in the lives of his characters, but in almost all of his films this bond is treated in parallel with paternal-filial relationships –which this research focuses on. Rosales portrays various models of fatherhood, some clearly failed and others in the light of positive construction. This study aims to analyse, through qualitative and filmic analysis, the design and evolution of these characters, to search for a pattern of fatherhood with common characteristics, to determine if it is a personal theme in the films of Rosales, and to investigate cinematographic resources that specifically make an original portrait of fatherhood. In this sense, we discover that in Rosales’ cinema, the father’s gaze hardly meets that of the son, daughter, or couple, and for this, the director uses various visual strategies such as polyvision, the subjective shot, or panoramic shots to ensure that these gazes, in fact, almost never meet.