The novel “La Uruguaya” by Pedro Mairal comes to the cinema with the imprint of creative collaboration

(By Ana Clara Pérez Cotten). With a commitment to dialogue between the codes of literature and those of cinema, “La Uruguaya” is released, the film based on the novel by Pedro Mairal and directed by Ana García Blaya, which was filmed thanks to the financing and creative contribution of 1961 associated producers of the Orsai community.

Distributed by Disney, “La Uruguaya” is the first commercial film made with the contribution of thousands of members of the Orsai Community – an original and tremendous financing scheme for the figures required by the industry, without the financial participation of INCAA or platforms, neither from the State, nor from private companies- and will hit theaters on August 17.

According to “the Orsai model”, created in light of the inventiveness of the pandemic months, throughout the filming the partners voted for the leads, debated, decided on locations, were extras in the film and, after the sale of the distribution to Disney, they also received dividends.

Starring Sebastián Arzeno (who plays the writer Lucas Pereyra) and Fiorella Bottaioli (who is Magalí Guerra, the Uruguayan who falls in love with him), the film, beyond being based on Mairal’s book, respects and redefines the dynamics of cinema and literature and it leaves the most basic scheme of adaptation. In a first stage, Hernán Casciari and Christian Basilis de Orzar worked on the script and later the journalist and writer Josefina Licitra joined.

The film, which garnered applause when it was presented in November at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, can be classified as a comedy about the misadventures and existential doubts of a writer in his forties, who with an excuse travels to Montevideo to meet with a girl 20 years younger than he met on a previous trip. But far from resting on the story that Mairal left embodied in the novel he published in 2016, the project assumes risks: it incorporates scenes and winks that those who have read the text will be able to discover, it makes cuts, changes the narrator and adds a look.

“I had read the novel and the first thing I did was reread it and understand that the adaptation was going to be a challenge because the text has a lot of the protagonist’s inner world,” Blaya told Télam in the framework of the film’s presentation in Mar del Silver. She was also able to write scenes, something that ended up condensing the process that turned the novel into a script to finally see the film being born.

Mairal, who had already seen his novel “A Night with Sabrina Love” become a film by Alejandro Agresti, took on the challenge of re-editing with experience but from a different position. “I got involved in the project at the beginning, when Orsai bought the rights. And I did it in a rather playful way because from my first experience with ‘A Night with Sabrina Love’ I understood that the author of a novel that is adapted to the cinema has to release it to let them transform it. So, I really enjoyed it and I was able to collaborate in a rather lateral way. I made a song, went to the filming and trusted a lot in the look of Ana García Blaya”, Mairal tells Télam about this “second opportunity” that was given as an author.

He also recognizes that the creative and collaborative scheme that guided the project greatly facilitated that playful enthusiasm that allowed him to be part of the project from another side: “There is something very particular in the film because of the way in which the Orsai community participated. I think that that attracted me a lot, that it was done collectively among all the associated producers. At first, I imagined that it could be very difficult to combine all these wills, but the exact opposite happened: some contributed ideas, others offered locations as a office for a scene or a van. Lots of people added their ideas and enthusiasm.”

Mairal’s role in the project diversified to the point that he made a “cameo” in a scene filmed a few meters from Valizas beach. “It was very nice to meet the associated producers, with some of us we continue to see each other. I think that this joint creative experience left a strong mark on the film, even with how difficult and laborious it is to make films,” she assumes.

The latest edition of the book, made a few days ago by Emecé to keep up with the film release, has one of the scenes from the film on the cover and feeds back the dialogue between the pages and the screen. Is “La Uruguaya” a cinematographic novel that was born to be a film? Mairal disagrees with this hypothesis. “I don’t think of my novels in a cinematographic way. Instead, I try to make these stories work with words. My writing is usually sensorial or visual, and perhaps that is why my books seem cinematographic but they are not. The story of “La Uruguaya “It is a great internal monologue and that is not very cinematographic, apart from the fact that the trip to Montevideo has a lot of action. But I think that the novel is not that but everything that happens to the character and that was very difficult to take to the cinema and it was a challenge for the writers,” he says.

For the writer, the great achievement of the adaptation is that the film “responds to the book with the change of point of view” of the narrator. “The novel is focused on the subjectivity of a man, and the film tells the story from the perspective of a woman. So, the adaptation expands the book and encourages areas where the text does not go and generates great dialogue between the text and the film.It could have been possible due to the look of Ana García Blaya, but also because of the performances of Jazmín Stuart and Fiorella Bottaioli, but also Josefina Licitra in the script, a team that knew how to add a different look to that of the book “, risk.

Mairal was also encouraged to “rewrite” his own work and wrote the zamba “La vidita”, in homage to a phrase from the novel (“If you can’t handle life, try life”), which can be heard during the screening . “For a matter of metrics I ended up putting in the chorus `If you can’t handle life, let’s try life.’ I wrote lyrics and music and Rafa Otegui, my musical partner with whom we are about to release a record soon, “I thought Friday”, she put her voice on and it was very beautiful. I like to write songs and have others sing them. I gave it to Ana, she loved it and decided to put it on. It sounds in the trailer and when the titles fall and that has me very glad”.

All these literary, cinematographic and musical codes come together in a project that was not content with simply “translating” Mairal’s text and that, in a creative bet, became an authentic rewriting and a response that defends a new look at “La Uruguayan”.