On Wednesday I was at the premiere of the Garci movie. Rarely in my life have I heard an ovation as prolonged and justified as the one that broke out at the end. I added my applause to all the spectators who filled the Capitol. Spectators, I say, not cinephiles, who are to the cinema what gourmets to the art of Luculus. The former watch the films as if they were listening to a lecture and the latter wield the fork with the frown and effort of those who qualify a doctoral thesis. Many of us gave Garci as lost for the movies . He himself spoke of that task as if it were already a thing of the past, and not because his talent was in a waning room, but because of the financial constraints and the lack of imagination that condition our film industry. And in that, all of a sudden, the aforementioned you are a crack , Jose ... You're the One picks up at the age of seventy-six with a movie like before: authentic cinema, without computer tricks, peripherals , vedetisms or tremendisms, concise, exact, in which nothing is left over and to which nothing can be added, and in which each plane is a right hand given to the spectator's jaw. Blessed black and white put at the service of an atmosphere, lighting, interpretation, realization, script and some dialogues bordering on excellence! I write down, among many others, three phrases like darts ... "His face no longer bears". "I met some titis as tight as the nuts of a submarine." "When someone says he is not faithful, but loyal, he is looking for the alibi to fool his partner." Black cinema? You are right. American cinema of the Golden Age? Well also . Cinema like the one Garci himself, and I, and so many others, saw in the double-program venues that will never return? Definitely. But cinema, above all, capable of creating a time machine whose interior turns its crank to rebours and turns the spectator to be a child, adolescent, young and inhabitant of what Stefan Zweig called in his Memoirs The World of Yesterday . Garci's film runs broken by crepuscular frames in which that humble, cordial and semi-empty Madrid appears in which the best years of our lives have passed. At the end, after the ovation, we all went to the Gran Vía of pizzas, hamburgers, mobiles and video cameras, and yesterday's world was today again.

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