Obituary Pilar Bardem dies at the age of 82, survivor and dynasty of Spanish cinema
"The poor are princes who have to reconquer their kingdom", is heard as a motto and creed in
'No one will speak of us when we are dead'.
Although the protagonist of the film shot by
Agustín Díaz Yanes
in 1995 is Victoria Abril - a woman with a shotgun who, as the actress herself liked to say, "starts on her knees sucking her for 5,000 and ends up standing up demanding what is hers by right" -, the moral beacon of everything that moves this underworld of bullfighters and gangsters is none other than the mother, mother
Pilar Bardem.
His is eminently a code that speaks of dignity, effort and, above all, courage. Abandoned with a bull-slaughtering son bedridden after a bad afternoon, she remains upright not so much to prove anything to anyone, as for the clarity of instinct, for the fatality of the gestures learned. He wants simply because he can. Not the other way around.
One would say that something of the character of Doña Julia has always been in the woman who died yesterday at the age of 82 in Madrid from cancer. In her memoirs published in 2005, she proudly stood up against resentment. "The resentment is a burden. You have to move forward," he said in every interview he had occasion to make clear that this was not a settling of accounts, but, as in the film itself, an exercise in coherence. Daughter of the actors
Rafael Bardem and Matilde Sampedro,
descendant therefore of one of the noblest lineages of Spanish comedians and sister of the filmmaker
Juan Antonio Bardem,
Pilar's in life was the role of a woman who ended up feeling like a victim of the effort that everyone around her made to pass her off as a strong woman. "That is hard, because it requires you to live up to what others want to think of you. You are the one who has to move things forward. And no. Deep down I have always been shy, but by dint of doing I came to believe the role, "he commented.
The list of films that mark his career is long, almost 80. It seems that because of DNA. And in reality, despite the love shown to the profession, the explanation is not so easy. She ended up as an actress because the virtue of instinct wanted it that way; because, again, he ended up making his own the role that life insisted on assigning him. Rather than a belated vocation, his was a sudden vocation. She was an elegant mannequin, a singer with a harsh and tortured voice and, when life got tough, she even was a housekeeper for hours. But it was only when she decided to separate, when she had no choice but to play the role that fate had always kept for her: that of a tough woman, that of an actress forever.
When asked about her vocation, she answered that the only one she knew was her mother's. But mother who can do everything. Something of the mythical character of
Bertold Brecht
also seems his. "Say what you want," is heard in the play '
Mother Courage and her children'
by the German playwright, "but there is nothing like war. They say that it kills the weakest, but they also burst when there is peace. And Instead, war feeds those of us who resist. " And perhaps there, in perpetual resistance, Pilar Bardem.
There is a very tenuous but infallible line that joins perhaps two of the most notable films of his career: '
The World Continues
', by
Fernando Fernán Gómez
, and that of Díaz Yanes. The first was shot in 1963 almost in silence and what is guessed is a bleeding portrait of what the Spain of that time wanted to hide. The country that is guessed is brutal, obscene, mediocre, coarse, violent and very sad. And, above all, macho. The women who appear there try to resist without hope. The second won the Goya for best supporting actress and became one of the flagships of a new cinema; the new cinema in the 90s in which women were the protagonists. And they resisted. And in the middle, not by chance, Pilar, a woman who changed the dreams of a missionary as a child for those of an activist when she grew up.
In a short film entitled
'The mother' she
played a mother, a despotic and capricious mother. The film was signed by
Miguel Bardem
, his nephew, and he shared the limelight with
Javier Bardem,
his son who played, precisely, the son. It seems that the two embody the opposite of what they were in real life: the first tyrant and the second submissive. And it would seem that by being a mother in each and every one of the modalities, Pilar ended up being able to even give life to the mother contrary to the mother she always was.
"I can only confess, for whoever wants to read it, that my children, my trade and commitment to society and the causes that I consider fair have been and are my life," he recently wrote and did so with the same transparency as his character from 'No one will speak ...' rise against the obvious.
"The poor are princes who have to reconquer their kingdom," it is heard.
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