Gabriel Azorín debuts in Venice with his timeless, Latin-language film: "Men have lost, to women, the art of conversation."

Time, beyond anticyclones and storms, is probably the only obsession with meaning, with a sense of time itself, a sense of the space that forms and deforms in its wake, and, while we're at it, a sense of its meaninglessness. Time is not part of life; rather, it is life itself that acquires its character as such, its life, thanks precisely to time.

Let's say that this, to put it mildly, circular reflection could very well appear on the cover of a film like Last Night I Conquered Thebes . Gabriel Azorín makes his feature film debut, and his recently presented film in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival is revealed as a delicate, measured, anomalous, and rigorous exercise in timeless cinema; or, better yet, cinema that invites the viewer to inhabit the strange timelessness of a production that takes place simultaneously in Ancient Rome and in the present . Without a break, without interruptions, without false sets, with nothing but the night, the conversation, the water, the stars, and the frozen sensation of, once again, time.

"It all started," the debut filmmaker explains, "when I visited the Roman baths of Bande, in Orense, with a friend. They were a kind of sarcophagus-shaped bathtub. I stayed alone at night looking at the stars. ' How many people have done the same thing throughout history, since they were built?' I thought. You feel alone and at the same time, accompanied." The film is based on this intuition and, from there, is carried away by the vapor of images that could equally be from the most remote past or the most furious present. Timeless.

The film tells the story of Roman soldiers sharing their fears, desires, and renunciations. And, at the same time, it tells the story of contemporary Portuguese youth sharing the same thing: desires, fears, and renunciations . "The truth is that men spend a lot of time together and aren't capable of telling each other what really matters or worries us. We've lost, unlike women, the art of conversation. A friend told me the film seemed like science fiction to her because she'd rarely seen men truly speaking and not putting on a mask to captivate others," says Azorín, and I can't help but agree.

Going against the grain of cinema now considered new, determined to sacrifice dialogue on the altar of verisimilitude, Last Night I Conquered Thebes lives entirely in the word. This director, who cites Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis before Mia Hansen-Love, is a proposal as focused on what is heard as it is attentive to everything the camera usually disregards. It is a cinema of light dedicated to the laborious task of revealing mysteries and silences , but shot mostly in darkness, in the depths of a star-studded night; it is an ironically epic cinema, almost a peplum, but focused only on intimate gestures; it is cinema traversed by time, but, it has been said, timeless.

And then there's Latin . His characters speak either Portuguese or Latin, a language that, at least in film, isn't exactly fashionable. "In truth, what's not fashionable at all is simply speaking," says the director bluntly, assuming with a naturalness somewhere between tremendously humble and exaggeratedly arrogant that, if his characters are soldiers of Ancient Rome, it's only logical that they speak Latin. And so they do. Last Night I Conquered Thebes is already the most vaporous and superb anomaly in Spanish cinema this year.