It seems Fernando Trueba is back in action, which is actually no surprise considering the guy has averaged about a film every two years since the late-seventies. Even so, it’s hard not to look forward to the latest from the Spanish director who’s made a nearly 40-year career out of music, nostalgia, and good old-fashioned romance.
Coming off of an Oscar nomination in 2012 for the animated Latin Jazz epic Chico y Rita, and a similarly successful festival run for 2012’s The Artist and the Model, Trueba has decided to attempt a sequel to his highly successful 1998 comedy-drama The Girl of Your Dreams, which featured Trueba’s muse Penelope Cruz as an Andalusian actress shooting a film in Nazi Germany.
With the entirety of The Girl of Your Dreams’ principal cast back on board for the sequel – to be titled The Queen of Spain – Trueba has jumped forward from 1930s Germany to 1950s Spain. It’s a time when American film studios were using the country for location shoots on films like El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire, while the Spanish people suffered under the dictatorial yoke of el Generalísimo Francisco Franco.
To date, Trueba’s astoundingly prolific career has traveled through time and space, covering a good chunk of the twentieth century with films set in locations as diverse as Paris, Chile, Cuba, and New York. The Spanish Civil War, of course, has been a recurring theme in his filmography, but this will be the first time the madrileño takes on the golden years of Franco’s dictatorship, when U.S. trade flourished in the heat of the Cold War.
His peculiar mix of comedy, melodrama, and surrealism is an unmistakable personal stamp that is also in many ways deeply Spanish, and we can undoubtedly expect some combination of the three in The Queen of Spain.
In the meantime, here’s the trailer for The Girl of Your Dreams to hold us all over until more details are released about the upcoming production.
UPDATE 8/1/17: Check out the trailer for The Queen of Spain which opens at the Quad Cinema in New York on August 18, 2017.