VALENCIA 2024
Review: A Bathroom of One's Own

by Júlia Olmo, Cineuropa
October 25, 2024

Despite its naive message, the result is a film that never loses the freshness and originality of its starting point.

Lucía Casañ writes a daring and interesting intimate tragicomedy about a woman's search for independence and freedom.

“I have never known why people like the smell of napalm in the morning. Nor why it is strange that I like the smell of the bathroom. You know, that dense, sometimes fruity aroma, but for me the bathroom is the only place where I can say “occupied”, and people leave me alone,” says the protagonist of A Bathroom of One’s Own, the debut feature film by Valencian director Lucía Casañ Rodríguez.

A Bathroom of One's Own held its world premiere at the Shanghai International Film Festival and it now opens the 39th edition of the Official Selection of the Mostra de València-Cinema del Mediterrani.


Nuria González in A Bathroom of One's Own

Starring Nuria González, the film tells the story of Antonia, a 65-year-old housewife who spends her days attending to household duties and family chores. However, this affable-looking woman has a strange secret: she is obsessed with bathrooms. This is the only place where she can escape from her monotonous life, the only refuge where she can give free rein to her true vocation: writing. There she escapes from her everyday life, experiences unique situations, makes rare friendships and becomes who she wants to be.

From drama crossed with absurd comedy and fantasy, the film addresses a woman's search for independence, her inequality, her difficulty to have her own space, independent of her family and environment, everything that surrounds her and encloses her, her desire to be who she really wants to be, free of ties, her loneliness, the need for this struggle to be collective. It touches on life’s hopes and disappointments, on what the passage of time does to people, on the power of imagination and art, on the search for the extraordinary in the ordinary.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write,” wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own. Lucía Casañ quotes this famous phrase by the British writer and turns it into the leitmotiv of the film, taking it to her own territory with a certain originality and humour. The premise of turning the room into a bathroom is daring and ingenious, a daring that sometimes manages to surprise and amuse, and at other times falls into easy clichés and situations that end up being too forced and implausible. The director also plays with a certain tendency towards surrealism, symbolism and theatricality (both in substance and form, mixing aesthetics, tones and genres) which, in the same way, also ends up being irregular. At times, it works and at others it ends up in a too evident sham.

However, despite its excesses (or shortcomings), this courage in narrating ends up playing in its favour. Despite its naive message, the result is a film that never loses the freshness and originality of its starting point. It achieves certain unexpected twists and turns, moments as strange as they are comic, and conveys a tenderness and empathy for its characters that ends up being one of its great virtues.

A Bathroom of One's Own is a daring and interesting debut film that is not afraid to make mistakes, to fail and get it right, charting its own style and personality. An intimate tragicomedy about a woman's quest for independence, but also a hymn to the imagination, to its transformative and liberating power. A film as irregular as it is unique.

A Bathroom of One's Own is produced by Producciones Televisivas Mecomlys, whose international sales and distribution in Spain are managed by Begin Again.