Someone said that the quinqui cinema, that of the 1980s by José Antonio de la Loma and Eloy de la Iglesia , gave a tug on the conciliatory account of the Transition. In passing, it forced Spain that was traveling by AVE to Europe to look the other way, where it did not want to; there where unemployment, school failure, the horizontal shantytown of the suburbs and heroin (a lot of heroin) contradicted to the point of exasperation each of the achievements duly exhibited at the Seville Exhibition of All Universes. In fact, that is the thesis that supports the mandatory study Outside the law. Sieges of the quinqui phenomenon in the Spanish Transition (Comares) and that, in its own way, reviews and revisits Hasta el cielo , by Daniel Calparsoro,presented at the Malaga Festival of the pandemic and of all the crises to come. But be careful, it is not about historical cinema, not even nostalgic. Upside down. Daniel Calparsoro regains his best pulse to, without exaggeration, return to the desolation of Salto al Vacuum (1995), she is also a quinqui epigone, and update that declassified, bordering and unstable discourse that is both ecstasy and refutation of everything that it consumes the consumer society that consumes us. And so.

«The quinqui hero had no plan. He acted out of desperation. My protagonists, on the contrary, have everything perfectly and meticulously organized ", the director points out to mark distances and, at the same time, give clues about how things have changed.

To situate ourselves, the film with a Miguel Herrán who grows with every step he takes and is attended by a Carolina Yuste who is crying out to star in everything (you cannot be more elegantly badass) is kept in the strict registers of the thriller by commercial obligation . That too (intended for the public) was the cinema of those years. From the hand of a script, signed by Jorge Guerricaechevarría , well sewn to the ambition of its protagonist, the film traces the ascent of a son of the suburbs from the shack to the highest floor of the towers of Madrid, where, apparently , reputations and millions are whitewashed. Quite a classic air libretto that sounds like a trap (or something similar) and smells like burnt rubber, it doesn't matter if it's from a Seat 124 or an Audi. After all, both have been robbed.

The director says that few projects have taken him so much and he has wanted so hard. It was in 2013 when, through a television program, he heard about the Villaverde aluniceros. «I saw clearly that there was a movie. But the story was so surprising that one of the goals of the film is to make it believable. Once again, the reality is too stark to be credible, ”he says. And thus, one of the greatest and most brilliant virtues of Hasta el cielo consists precisely in its determination to stand together in the middle. It is genre cinema that lives by punctually following the rules of the show , but something creeps through the cracks due to texture and viscosity very close to reality itself. «When you make auteur cinema you can abstract yourself from the world around you. Gender, by force and to be true, has to drink and make a foothold in its contemporaneity, ”explains Professor Calparsoro. And we believe you.

THE TALENT OF CAROLINA YUSTE

In fact, and in line with what was just mentioned, everything in the film is designed, always from the archetype of the policeman, for a kind of sweet discomfort, a contradiction that carefully avoids obvious classifications. At the end of the day, the hero (or villain, depending on how you look at it) quinqui, to go back to the beginning, has an unstable ontological status; it is not clear whether he is a payo or a gypsy; it appears in the boundary space of otherness and difference, on the margins of the hyper-neoliberal hyperconsumption society that longs for and desires as much as it despises. His way of enjoying luxury goes first by destroying, through the brutal and beautiful act of the moon landing, a shop window on Calle Serrano: the best representation and glory of our madness. The exaltation of the obscene ends up being his best parody, his most elegant criticism. Of pure rudeness. And that's where the genetic code of Hasta el cielo coincides with that of Navajeros. Or with Quick, Quick. Perhaps the difference is despair. My hero knows that his only social elevator is crime, but he knows how to play his cards. The anger does not belong to him », clarifies the director. Be that as it may, the quinqui, the one from before and the one from now, is both a victim and a resistant hero; subject for condemnation and for heroism.

The leaks of reality through the fabric of fiction reach the cast of the film itself. Along with the aforementioned actors and others more or less established (special mentions for Luis Tosar, Fernando Cayo and Patricia Vico), a good part of all the rest is made up of interpreters of the so-called naturals. That or debut film musicians (Dollar Selmouni) . And thus, the film advances pending of each one of its edges. It is important that photography shines and acquires the touch of desire, but without neglecting that already mythical space of the open field, as a metonymy of the distance between classes, which has not just disappeared. Herrán, who debuted precisely in another quinqui variation like Daniel Guzmán's In exchange for nothing , recovers the breath of the neighborhood. And Carolina Yuste, who was seen in Carmen y Lola de Arantxa Echevarria, now acquires the size and vertigo of minimal cliffs. Each of her appearances is resolved with a burst of talent. She, for everything she represents and everything she takes, ends up being the movie itself. Yes, the sour machismo that presides over the quinqui cinema is now experiencing a feminine ending as part of the brilliant update of the subgenre that all this entails.

Yes you will, and to hurry the metaphor, an energetic and beautiful pull to the Malaga Festival.

'THE GIRLS' OR THE GRAY OF THE 90S

The other film in competition came to Malaga from Berlin. Or, if you prefer, from the last festival before the lockdown to the first before ... the second lockdown. 'The girls', by newcomer director Pilar Palomero , shares a certain family air with Calparsoro's film. If one makes a foothold in the quinqui cinema as a refutation of the most brilliant account of the Transition, the other is directly a rewriting of that time, the 90s, in which Spain dreamed of euphoric. Palomero puts the whole film to rest in the absent gesture of the very young actress Andrea Fandos who gives life to the daughter of a single mother (Natalia de Molina) when morals hurt. It is about playing with contrasts. Outside, the country receives a new and multicolored time where the Expo and the Olympic Games shine. Inside, everything insists on the gray color of the immutable, of the eternal, of the stale. The director says that Celia's adventure has much of herself and of a past where at school they talked about sin, guilt ... "and then on TV you would see Jesús Gil surrounded by girls in bikini." What follows is a meticulous movie in describing memory. Bella in her sad picture .

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