3 hours ago
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EL 47
Rated M.
110 minutes
In cinemas July 10
★★★★
When Franco, the Spanish dictator, died in 1975 after decades of fascist rule, the effect on the country’s film industry was immediate.
Forty years of pent-up grievances and frustrations exploded on to the screen in a display of colour, movement and melodrama. And it shows no signs of dissipating. I’m happy to say restraint still plays a minor role in the language of Spanish cinema.
But it can get serious. The director, Marcel Barrena, who favours social realism drawn from true stories, looks back to the Franco era in the opening scenes of EL 47.
Eduard Fernandez is one of Spain’s big stars, but you’d hardly know it in this role.Credit: Lucia Faraig
It’s 1958 and a community of working-class people who have been forced from Extremadura and Andalusia by rising real estate prices and rapacious landlords, have bought small plots of land in Torre Baro, a hilly area on the outskirts of Barcelona. The terms of this arrangement are unbelievably harsh. They can build shanties if they can get them up in a single night. If their roofs are not on by dawn, the Civil Guard will come in and tear them down.
Against all the odds, they manage this with a collective effort, getting together to erect one house at a time. And 20 years later, most of these people are still in Torre Baro, having made the shacks into relatively comfortable houses. But the power and water supply is unreliable, the roads are unpaved and potholed and there’s no public transport.
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Manolo Vital and his wife, Carmen (Clara Segura), a former nun who left her order to marry him, are unofficial community leaders. She teaches the children to read and write, while he’s the one who pushed everybody to work together on their houses in establishing the settlement.
He’s played by Eduard Fernández, one of Spain’s big stars, but you’d hardly know it. Fernández has poured himself into the portrait of an ordinary man made remarkable by having to spend much of his life dealing with extraordinary circumstances.
Bluff and a little scruffy with a paunch and a weathered face, Manolo looks as if his activist days are well behind him. He’s a bus driver on Route 47 and he walks down the hill to work every day, proud of the skill with which he negotiates the Barcelona traffic and pleased to greet the passengers who travel with him every morning.
It’s not hard to see what’s going to happen next even if you know nothing about the real Manolo and the act of rebellion that catapulted his name into newspaper headlines and saw him honoured with a memorial in Torre Baro.
I think the facts of it all may have included few more wrinkles and twists but Barrena and his co-writer, Alberto Marini, have chosen to leave them out, shaping their script into a classic triumph of the underdog tale as Manolo gradually becomes obsessed with his plan to give his neighbourhood a long-awaited bus service.
So there’s not much narrative suspense but there is pleasure to be had in getting to know him and Carmen and seeing what they and their neighbours are up against in simply securing the basics of existence – food, shelter, warmth and the ability to light their homes and educate their children.
This is where Barrena’s strengths lie. Celebrated for his documentaries, he has a sharp eye for the telling details of everyday living – the effort needed for an elderly woman to haul a shopping trolley up a flight of steps, the humiliation of a mother whose child can read and write although she herself has never had the chance to learn.
I left his film with a strong sense of the Franco regime’s enduring influence on Spanish bureaucracy and just how much the country’s films are still doing to bring it to light.
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