Dealing with life is complicated. Rafael Azcona maintained that life consists of the impossible exercise of finding the exact amount of air blown from the lungs that fits in a balloon. The feeling of failure is valid as much for the one who remains without knowing the limit (there will always be the doubt of one more breath) as for the one who attends the simple outbreak of his most elemental desire. We are dissatisfied animals. He also said that cinema, in general, should be banned because not only does it make you an idiot but it brings you back to reality a wreck. 'The Europeans' , signed by Víctor García Leónabout the novel that the screenwriter published in 1960, he moves exactly between these two reflections: between the drowning humor of the first and the self-critical clairvoyance of the second. And in between, a proverbially sad comedy; an unbeatable closing for a rare Malaga Festival, pandemically strange.

"Perhaps the image of the most celebrated Azcona is linked to Berlanga, who was an optimistic Valencian. But then there is another, Marco Ferreri's, closer to violent humor and comic tragedy , which is precisely the Azcona that interests me the most" , says the director to avoid perplexities and, already put, anticipate disappointments that, how could it be otherwise, there are. Because, in effect, ' The Europeans' is not so much an unsatisfied film as a film for and about dissatisfaction (nuance matters); luminous in its blatant sadness; disappointed in her conviction when it comes to reflecting and telling an essentially ridiculous world and, as noted above, without air. It is Antarctic cinema that refutes the bombast by its brilliant and hypnotic force.

To situate ourselves, the film tells the story of two young people who, during the harsh Franco winter, travel to Ibiza in the 1950s behind the sun, clear air and, above all, European tourists. Europeans, even today, are always the others. In reality, what they are looking for is what, in the absence of a better definition, time has called freedom. And there they will discover exactly what they are looking for. The problem with wanting something is that you run the risk of getting it. And, of course, immediately afterwards, fear appears, the authentic dread of everything new, of going over the top of the balloon of yore. "We live in a strange country," says the director. And he continues: "We are the ones who most criticize what is ours, but, at the same time, those who are most comfortable in our own land and least willing to change . " Rare.

The story starring Raúl Arévalo and Juan Diego Botto runs on the screen almost oblivious to itself. What matters are not so many the ups and downs of a tale of discovery and defeat as the sense of loss, the perplexity at the essentially perplexed. Between impressionist by its manners and only lasts as the very reality that it transcribes, ' The Europeans ' wants to be a portrait of an era with the same clarity as a description of an essentially eternal way of understanding and being in the world. And it is there, in its ironic rawness, in its sour laugh, where it becomes great, hopelessly great . If cinema is almost by definition a way of confusing reality with dreams, here only confusion matters. Sparkly.

The director says that since he took over the project he felt strange. At the end of the day, he is the son of José Luis García Sánchez , not in vain another of Azcona's most faithful collaborators. "It was like pissing on my father's chamber pot," says Graphic. He also relates that some time ago he collaborated with Azcona on a script that was left without seeing the light. "Every work session with him was like being run over by a buffalo. Or a tram. He turned everything around. He was basically a self-deprecating animal ," he recalls. And for the end he leaves the recommendation that Azcona gave him and that is still there, on the frontispiece of his way of understanding cinema: "Cinema is in life." We imagine that he was referring to the one we walk through turned into wrecks precisely because of the cinema.

Be that as it may, what remains is a film that is funny in its sadness, sad in its hurtful joviality; a film that turns disillusioned and bled self-criticism into a style. "We live in a place where education is lacking, where each one always thinks about what interests him or what makes him feel comfortable, where we only recognize ourselves in our own. That makes us have an ungenerous upper class. Somehow, the Little appreciation for culture is what defines us best and makes us who we are. Culture helps to put things in their place, to self-criticism, "he says and breathes out. Balloon stuff. And from Azcona.

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