What’s Crooked Lines of God About | Bárbara Lennie and Eduard Fernández make a foray into madness

When Oriol Paulo was offered to take the novel ‘The crooked lines of God’ to the movies, he wanted to run away. After thinking about it for six months, she accepted the challenge and wrote a script with Barbara Lennie in mind, who plays Alice Gould on the big screen, an ambiguous and deceitful character, of whom it is not known for sure if she is a detective who enters in a psychiatric hospital to solve a crime or if she is an intelligent and lying madwoman who believes she is a private investigator. ‘The crooked lines of God’ is a thriller related to madhouse films, a work that keeps the viewer mired in uncertainty.

The first difficulty for the film adaptation is that the book, the work of Torcuato Luca de Tena published in 1979, had aged badly, so Paula chose to approach the main character, Alice Gould, from another perspective. If in the novel there was a hidden fight between the sexes, in the film the director has opted for an “ego fight”: the patient confronts her psychiatrist and tries to relieve herself as a sane, determined and even sarcastic woman in front of her antagonist . “There was one thing that was in the novel and that we wanted to promote: female empowerment,” says Paulo. The book, a ‘best seller’ of more than forty years ago, required a great effort of condensation, since the plots were enough to make a series if you wanted. Bárbara Lennie puts herself in the shoes of a rich, elegant, cultured woman diagnosed as paranoid, despite whom she is highly skilled in deceit and lies.

To capture the nuances of this mental illness, Lennie enlisted the help of her mother, a psychoanalyst, to lend credibility to her character. “Alice is deceitful, elusive, but deep down she tells the truth, although her truth can change depending on who she is with. She has a lot of ability to change her speech. She is smart to read reality and interpret it to move forward », says the actress, who already worked with Oriol Paulo in ‘Contratiempo’ (2017).

The film portrays the conflict between the old and the new psychiatry, that of electroshocks, ties and the prison regime, on the one hand, and that which tries to break through with therapies based on dialogue with the patient, occupational workshops and a more human face. Samuel Alvar, an old-school psychiatrist with misogynist undertones, played by Eduard Fernández, behaves firmly and rudely towards Lennie/Gould, who dares to challenge his authority. “One thing that fascinates me about the figure of the psychiatrist is that he looks at the patient with impunity, he analyzes him, something that produces a certain modesty in society,” says Fernández.

locations

Paulo and his team have investigated the folds of madness, although they have not reached the extreme of Torcuato Luca de Tena, who decided to seclude himself for 18 days in a psychiatric hospital to find out what he was talking about. It has been difficult to find materials that were part of the asylums of the time to compose the sets. The same thing happened with the locations. Very laborious was the search for sanatoriums from the 70s to shoot in them. Many were dilapidated and disused. In the end, they found the ideal place, the old Tabacalera de Tarragona, a spacious building abandoned for 15 years that required extensive gardening work to restore its splendor. For the interior of the asylum, more than 3,800 square meters of decoration were built inside the old Mercedes Factory in Barcelona.

The film shows the squalor of the sanatorium, but also the charms and sumptuousness of the upper bourgeoisie. Parties, polo matches, sumptuous houses… these are the settings for which Lennie also moves.

To dress Alice Gould, the wardrobe team even made a hand-embroidered dress with 1,600 Swarovski crystals. Instead, to set the scene for the psychiatric confinement, old clothes were used to dress the 2,000 extras.

Apart from Eduard Fernández, Bárbara Lennie and Loreto Mauleón, the cast includes actors such as Fede Aguado, Javier Beltrán, Pablo Derqui and Adelfa Calvo.