Live is Life Review: A Classic Coming-Of-Age Tale Centered Around Journey Of Initiation
Starring: Adrián Baena, Juan del Pozo, Raúl del Pozo
Director: Dani de la Torre
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Live is Life is a classic coming-of-age tale centered around a group of friends and a journey of initiation. When you are small, everything is big, huge, it is a matter of life or death, it is when the person you like does not correspond to your feelings when a friend changes town when you do not okay in school. Everything is experienced in an exasperated way because that is how it is, that is how it must be. For the protagonists of Live is Life, Dani de la Torre’s film, which entered the Netflix catalog on July 18, 2022, is even more so.
Álvaro (Juan del Pozo), Maza (Raúl del Pozo), Rodri (Adrián Baena), Garriga (Javier Casellas) and Suso (David Rodríguez) have always been friends and are growing up, and in what will be the last and, perhaps, the most important summer of their childhood they will have to make a journey after which nothing will ever be the same. Rodri is a restless student and, at the end of school, has only one thought: to see his friends again. Once reunited, they organize an excursion, camp overnight and collect the leaves of a flower that is said to have magical powers to heal Álvaro and Suso’s father, in a coma following an accident.
Live is Life Review: The Story
Each with their pain, all together for a single purpose, a journey to be made together. Live is Life is a classic coming-of-age story at the center of which there are many of the films of the past: the melancholy, the sadness, the sense of union that perhaps only in childhood you have, typical of The Goonies, Stand by Me just to name a few, the most important, are found in this work. There are these five guys ready to grow up but to do so they must go through this hot, sticky, poignant summer, everyone is ready to tear off the patch, to find themselves in front of their monsters, and maybe just because or just because everything is easier.
if you are together following a principle: I am your shield and you are my shield. One by one the friends find themselves: Álvaro who is fighting his battle, with cancer, there is his twin brother, Maza, who desperately does not know how to bear all this pain, Rodri who cannot tell his parents that he has failed his year at school, Garriga who has a crush on a girl and can’t find the courage to declare himself, Suso who has a constant thought, his father in a coma. Everyone is fighting their wars, big or small, which are even more difficult when one is in transformation. After they meet, they decide that they must do something to save those who may not make it (Álvaro and Suso’s father), who must speak clearly to each other to grow.
Live is Life Review and Analysis
The journey inevitably becomes a path of initiation, to grow you must lose something, you have to get lost and then rebuild yourself. As in the Greco-Roman civilizations, children are left far from the city to measure their abilities and qualities so also the five children are put to the test, the higher the bar is the greater the joy of overcoming the obstacle. The external crisis (the bullies who target children, the disease, the coma) demonstrates the internal crisis typical of this age made up of deep doubts, radical changes, very sensitive fragility and shows fears, even disruptive feelings, ruptures (we also clash harshly, we say cruel things to each other) which then strengthen relationships.
From minute to minute the gang finds itself in dialogue with the most hidden part of itself and therefore it discovers its side with which it has not yet had to do. From stage to stage it emerges that no one and nothing will be the same as before because the teachings will be many and direct: some learn that love is sometimes surprising, some understand that dialogue is necessary, and some speak with the fear that germinates inside and despite this, he becomes aware that living is life and one cannot stop, some come to terms with pain, some admit that the terror of losing the people they love is one inhuman agony.
To keep the boys together is friendship, the need to lean on each other, only in this way can we endure everything, only in this way can we overcome the obstacles that life places in front of us. Live is Life is a nostalgic and tender narration of an age that is sometimes difficult, sometimes even impossible, but extremely fascinating because change is around the corner and from one moment to the next, suddenly, the body, the item, the character changes. The arrival in the group of a little girl, called by the boys, or rather by Álvaro, Speranza, becomes fundamental in this perpetual, incessant motion that is growing up., which is a metaphor of what the boys feel and have found, a metaphor also for that mythological Pandora’s box in which It is at its bottom. The hope is that everything will pass, that you will be friends forever, that nothing will change despite everything being wonderfully in transition, and that surprises, as well as failure, are typical of life.
Live is Life Review: The Last Words
Live is Life is a rather classic work that seems dated years ago (bullies call kids using nicknames that now they wouldn’t be used in a movie), it follows stylistic features and constructions of those stories, and perhaps for this reason it strikes those who are that generation. The film is a poetic story that caresses the viewer thanks to these five boys caught in an extraordinary moment.
