‘Plácido’ could not be titled ‘Feel a poor man at his table’ because of the censorship. Sixty years ago, Luis García Berlanga portrayed through the vicissitudes of poor Cassen trying to pay the last letter of his motocarro a country in which everyone talks but nobody listens, in which Christian charity is more false than a four-pesetas hard , in which the poor are just as son of a bitch as the rich.
Is it familiar? The Valencian director, whose centenary has been celebrated this year about to end, captured over half a century in his films the essence of a country that he contemplated with a very personal mixture of sarcasm and tenderness. ‘Plácido’ was a momentous film for many reasons. It marked, as in ‘Casablanca’, the beginning of a beautiful friendship with the screenwriter Rafael Azcona that lasted ten films. At the same time, he established two style traits to which the director would remain faithful to the end: the choral character of his stories and the long, invisible sequence shots, with a multitude of characters speaking at the same time.
The reflection of a chaos based on lashes of humor and desolation, the accurate but painful X-ray of ourselves. «’Plácido’ is a film that rubs shoulders with the greatest masterpieces», praises Fernando Trueba in his ‘Dictionary of cinema’. Like them, he speaks of human weaknesses in only an apparently minor tone. It forces us to laugh at our miseries, it painstakingly portrays a time and a country but transcends it, becoming a universal work.
The family
With the brood in tow
Video.
Start of ‘Plácido’, released 60 years ago.
Berlanga was born in Valencia in 1921 into a family of agricultural landowners on his father’s side and merchants on his mother’s side who ran the most succulent pastry shop in the city. In his first film, ‘That Happy Couple’, co-directed with Juan Antonio Bardem in 1951, he already contemplates a modest couple who, thanks to a contest, can live the dream of a wealthy bourgeois family for twenty-four hours. As will happen with all his characters, the illusion of a better life never comes to fruition.
The protagonist of ‘Placido’ drags his offspring throughout Christmas Eve, including the permanently hungry lame brother-in-law that Manuel Alexandre embroiders. All for the family. As in ‘The Executioner’, where Pepe Isbert retires and his cowardly son-in-law (Nino Manfredi), faced with the danger of losing the apartment that has been granted to him as a civil servant, is forced to occupy the vacant position, although inside hope you never have to exercise. While he is not called, he continues to receive two salaries in a sample of Spanish picaresque: that of his trade, an undertaker, and that of an executioner. Of course, the Berlanguiana family par excellence are the Leguineche, aristocrats who have come to less than those we met in ‘La escopeta nacional’. The germ, the shot in the ass that Fraga gave Franco’s daughter on a hunt.
The woman
A “convoluted” misogyny
Video.
Fragment of ‘Natural size’ (1974).
We are not going to fool ourselves. Berlanga’s look at women is debatable in the #MeToo era. His obsession with object women is present in the actresses and chorus girls who attend the Christmas Eve dinner of ‘Plácido’, in the husband’s mistress of ‘La boutique’, in the foreigners of ‘¡Vivan los novios!’ or in the prostitutes of ‘La heifer’. The filmmaker never gave the leading role to a woman … except in ‘Life size’, the culmination of this objectification of women. The doll that drove the Parisian dentist incarnated as Michel Piccoli insane floated up when he threw himself into the waters of the Seine, symbol, according to Berlanga, “of woman as survivor and being indestructible.”
A confessed erotomaniac, a collector of erotic toys in his Somosaguas mansion, the author of ‘Calabuch’ always drew a woman in the shadow of a man. On rare occasions, as in ‘Boyfriend in sight’, it is she who leads the action. His misogyny arises from considering the female a biologically superior being, a tyrant who provokes hatred and fascination. “My misogyny is complex and convoluted,” Berlanga confessed. «He never goes on the macho side of thinking that women are an inferior being who is better off cleaning at home. On the contrary, I wish it were so ».
Political corruption
‘A bad Spanish’
Video.
Fragment of ‘The national shotgun’ (1978).
The trilogy that starts with ‘La escopeta nacional’ in a year as symbolic as 1978 and titles like ‘Moros y Cristianos’ and ‘Todos a la prison’ show a more disbelieving and enraged Berlanga than the one in the first part of his filmography. From the passage from the Falange to Opus Dei in the institutions to the disenchantment of the socialist government, from a hunt as the embodiment of the interlinings of a dying Francoism to the Leguineche saga, who in the early stages of ‘Nacional III’ finalized the patent for a crazy prototype of paella, while the family, which has already lost the palace, watches the coup of 23-F on television.
The man who defied censorship with ‘The Executioner’, a tirade against the pungent and scathing death penalty, always maintained his healthy skepticism towards the political class. During the dictatorship, the phrase that Franco pronounced after the Spanish authorities tried in vain to remove ‘The Executioner’ from the Venice Film Festival is famous: “Berlanga is not a communist, he is something worse: a bad Spaniard.” In democracy, his disagreement with the socialists is reflected in his memoirs, when he tells how he found out that he was no longer president of the National Film Library. Upon leaving a premiere, he greeted the Minister of Culture Javier Solana, accompanied by Pilar Miró. «Berlanga man! I think today I signed something for you in the ministry! What was it, Pilar? ». «The cessation».
Social hypocrisy
Denial of false charity
Video.
Fragment of ‘La heifer’ (1985).
A producer once told Berlanga that in the battles of the Civil War, what angered him most was when the enemy soldier yelled “son of a bitch” instead of being a fascist. And that’s where ‘La heifer’ came from. At the end of ‘Plácido’, we discover that the main family lives on Calle del Orden. “All these ‘misfortunes’ are the same,” snaps the man who comes to claim his Christmas basket, leaving two candles on Christmas Eve while we listen to the lyrics of a Christmas carol: “There has never been charity and there never will be …”.
In Berlanga’s films, a paralyzed man or a poor man can get his ass kicked. And that, according to the director, is not cruelty. “On the contrary, it is the denial of paternalism, of false goodness, of false charity,” he argued. In the trenches of ‘La vaquilla’, ideology disappears and the survival of the picaresque appears. In the end, the dead animal, flagged and destroyed, is not for either side. Two other memorable endings describe Berlanga’s sentiment toward a country of corrupt and hypocrites, of saints and sons of bitches. ‘All to jail’ culminates with a fart to the camera of the businessman who plays Saza; the last shot of his latest feature, ‘Paris-Timbuktu’, shot at the age of 78, is a poster that reads: «I’m afraid. L. ».
60 YEARS OF ‘PLÁCIDO’
Cruelty and tenderness
If someone had less than an hour and a half to get to know the cinema that Berlanga and Azcona made, I would definitely recommend seeing ‘Plácido’. There it is all: the chorality, the verbiage of the superimposed dialogues, the tone of cruelty combined with tenderness, the sequence shots …
In ‘Plácido’ is where Berlanga and Azcona rehearse and achieve in a more brilliant way that structure that they would later repeat in ‘La escopeta nacional’, that of a poor man who spends the entire film trying to be reasonable in the midst of absurdity.
It was his first collaboration, since Berlanga had seen ‘El pisito’, directed by Marco Ferreri and first screenplay by Azcona, and he had a crush on its tone, its theme, its writing. As Fernando Trueba says, as a Christmas movie, ‘Plácido’ is closer to ‘The Night of the Living Dead’ than to Frank Capra.
‘Plácido’ is a perfect movie. With a perfect script, simple in appearance, with a very classic structure, but invisible, which develops imperceptibly unstoppable. Their clear conflict walks us organically, credibly, inevitably, not only through a small provincial town, but above all through its inhabitants, from the poorest to the hypocritical, presumptuous and indifferent bourgeoisie. I particularly admire that, how Azcona and Berlanga are able to use in a natural way a deployment of characters that would overwhelm anyone in a forest of entrances and exits that do not give respite, each one giving his place and without getting lost in the labyrinth.
I am also amazed by the backgrounds, the amount of actions that take place in the background, behind the scenes of the main actors, behind a window, in a public bathroom, in a courtyard … And, although they talk constantly, the action is never resolved by the dialogue. Dialogue is another layer of meaning, but not the main or the only one. If you do the exercise of seeing it without sound, ‘Placido’ is just as beautiful or more. And vice versa, if you only listen to it, you will perceive how it is full of details, not only the visuals of light and camera or the actors of an exceptional cast, but also sound: a cat that meows, a radio that someone tunes in, a hackneyed Christmas carol …
Because that is another: the presence of the media as witnesses and instigators of a disaster from which they then wash their hands. They shot seven weeks in Manresa in February and March 1962. Who could travel back in time to learn from the teacher how to make that transparent cinema, without tricks or tricks!
The truth is that it is difficult to say something original about ‘Plácido’. It seems masterful to me because it incorporates into Spanish cinema, in full censorship, the narrative dynamics of Italian cinema from the golden age of the 1950s. It was about making a portrait of society in its complexity of classes, with a view from family precariousness and humanism, but without neglecting the narrative and also humor.
‘Placido’ is, in this genre, a masterpiece, acid, forceful. It is social cinema without preaching, without being predictable, without preaching for the convinced. It is an uncomfortable movie like a shoe with a nail, but full of wretched, gray, recognizable beings. His way of dialoguing in a hive, with characters such as industrious wasps, is exemplary. At the time, he received cruel criticism for focusing on dark elements in society. She was branded as “tremendous” and accused of gloating over the portrait of the wretch. As if that same defect had not raised Goya to the heights of a great painter.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/the-spain-that-berlanga-nailed-2/
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