•
Rating:
Sometimes I wonder what one might imagine if on any given day, maybe a Monday, instead of immersing oneself in the work routine and grappling with colleagues and managers, one finds oneself sitting on uncomfortable wooden chairs, slapped by the brisk sea breeze. But not for leisure, for a bit of relaxation. But because you have been fired. You are out of work. Because on that boat that used to send you daily to sweat among the sparks generated by welders and fill your lungs with iron dust in a shipyard, today you are racking your brain for a possible solution to bring some bread home. Because they used you until you were useful and then relegated you to the disgrace of unemployment, perhaps with a few blows on the back because you dared to protest.
In this dramatic situation, four friends find themselves, Santa, José, Paulino, and Amador. They’ve all spent at least half their lives, too old for new experiences and too young to retire. Santa, a braggart, provocateur, sharp-tongued, and pro-Australian. If the occasion arises, he doesn’t disdain illicit means and freeloading. One does what one can. José, married, no children, renting a house and with no car. Supported by his wife Ana who toils packaging tuna fillets. Standing and at night. Forced to use liters of deodorant to get rid of the stench she's obliged to absorb. Paulino, married with children, with a vacant look and very few smiles. He tries everything. He can't stand being without work, even at the cost of somehow renewing himself. Amador, abandoned by a wife he hopes to see again, lives among garbage bags piled in the house, the expected filth of a lonely man, with the water cut off and obsessed with not wasting electricity.
How to spend the days? Everything rolls off Santa’s back, and he's also suing for damaging a lamppost during the riot. The only one who has the courage to lighten the mood. José tries his luck by covering the lottery numbers based on the worn-out number of each seat progressively occupied. He can't stand being supported and is thus attacked by frustration. The others, who knows. Between watching half a game from three-quarters view in a makeshift stand and free lounging in a rich guy's house, they all feel connected by a thread, or rather a chain: friendship. Joined by Sergej, an ex-Soviet astronaut and currently unemployed Russian, and Reina, a stadium security officer and thus the only one working. Friendship is the only poetry that manages to keep them united, to involve them, to fill them with hope, to push them in the evening after days without conclusion, to drink in the squalid and cold bar of the only friend who has made a profit from his severance pay, Rico, who has a very smart daughter who always wears the same sweater. They drink and get drunk but not to forget. At least Amador does it to get closer to the only solution left to him when that light that obsesses him will finally go out forever.
A beautiful work by the young Spanish director, who manages to deeply capture the state of mind of someone who finds themselves with nothing in the palm of their hand. A film pervaded by a sadness that makes you reflect, that can even stump the sternest viewer. It strikes at the heart with an irony hard to handle in situations like this and occasionally even elicits some smiles. Accompanied by an essential but beautiful soundtrack by Lucio Godoy, the narration flows smoothly, although perhaps weighed down by truly icy, dark photography, where even the sun is dim like the psychological state, fully understandable, of the protagonists. Javier Bardem is superb in the role of Santa, but one cannot help mentioning other excellent actors worthy of their name, even if unknown to us. José Angel Egido, in the role of Paulino, Celso Bugallo, in the melancholic Amador, Joacquin Climent, the bartender Rico, and Luis Tosar, who plays José. It’s also worth highlighting the simple beauty, marred on this occasion by sadness but absolutely disarming, of Nieve De Medina in the role of Ana, José’s wife.
Never stop in front of obstacles, even if the only weapon you have, besides irony, is beer. Or at most Domenico Modugno’s international anthem dared at karaoke.
Loading comments slowly
