‘The August Virgin’: A Radiant, Summery Sojourn In Madrid That Brims With Life [Review]

“The August Virgin” starts with a death, albeit off-screen. When Eva goes to pick up the keys to the apartment she’ll be staying in for August, the writer who lives there tells her about an article he’s been commissioned to write about the recently deceased philosopher Stanley Cavell. He explains the admiration Cavell had for the Hollywood comedies of the 1930s, particularly the progressive films of Barbara Stanwyck and Katherine Hepburn, whose pictures the academic celebrated for being “about feminine identity, the courage of being oneself, knowing who you really are.” Director Jonás Trueba couldn’t have made the thesis statement for his latest feature any clearer. However, what Trueba understands is that finding yourself is sometimes no more difficult than being out in the world, and open to the experiences that you seek out, or just as frequently happen to find their way to you. And that having a realization about who you are doesn’t come from one momentous epiphany, but a collection of smaller ones. Unfolding with a charmingly, languorous stretch through the dog days of summer, “The August Virgin” is a breezy agglomeration of the moments both big and small that we only find out later make us the person that we are.

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