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Marx, with forgiveness, called it outright
"merchandise fetishism"
and on that concept he built all the rest. What the German was saying is, basically, that goods have a ghostly nature that only conceals the exploitation inherent in the creation of surplus value. That at the beginning. Then came a society, the one of today, that more than simple things actually produces desire for things that, in their condition by unreal force, do nothing more than add fog to fog, ghosts to confusion. And so.
Let's say that '
El buen patron',
by Fernando León de Aranoa, plays in this terrain not so much Marxist or post-Marxist or anti-Marxist as simple and abundantly revealing and chaotic.
It is about composing a comedy with the materials traditionally assigned to drama.
It is social cinema but tremendously selfish.
It is a horror movie not so much left-handed as right-handed.
The idea is to offer a portrait of what happens to us, very aware that the reality of work, that is what it is about, has ceased to be that hard thing of greedy businessmen and greedy proletarians.
Now, the film tells us, the perverse mechanics of the market and of desire can do everything.
And they flow between the cracks.
No one escapes the logic of the eagerness that is consumed in the festive celebration of consumption.
We have arrived.
The film, to put us, tells five days in the life of the owner of a family business. White Scales, from Mr. Blanco, awaits the visit of the commission on which the local award for business excellence depends. Everything must be immaculate, perfect and, of course, balanced. However, all of a sudden, things start to go wrong. The production manager goes mad with jealousy, a fired accountant sets up megaphone in hand in front of the factory, the trainee conspires to stop being one, and the good boss does what he can to be good. Although that leads to the worst of evils. Everything is twisted desires turned into merchandise that, suddenly, are transformed into fetishes. It is not so much the fetishism of the commodity as
the mercantilism of the fetish.
Almost 20 years after
'Mondays in the sun'
with which he won the Golden Shell right here in San Sebastián in 2002, León de Aranoa does not hide that what it is about now is to offer everything that was not seen then , the counter plane. If that was a story of unemployed people who were hurt by an identity fractured by the market and its industrial reconversions, the one that concerns us is a story of a man so aware of being exactly who he wants to be that it even scares. And have fun.
Bastard, but nice.
Let's say your problem is one of overidentity. Of course, everything around him remains, as then, perfectly broken. It's the market, my friend.
The strategy of the film is none other than to place a huge Javier Bardem in the middle and let the world, without exaggerations or caricatures, without excesses or miseries, appear before him. And it is discovered in its complex and very confused integrity. Pure fetish. It is comedy because, as Mack Sennett well knew, a drama is the pain caused by a stepfather and a farce is when a man falls into a ditch and dies. The film runs across the screen with a martial lightness that devastates everything.
It amuses with the clarity of a revelation that, with the same evidence, invites laughter and despair.
Everything is such a grossly enormous disaster, but so close and unreal at the same time, that it cannot be more than our most intimate and personal disaster.
The performance of the one who before, in '
Mondays in the Sun',
was Santa and now is Blanco is close to the proverbial. Each gesture is there to draw the outline of a cliff. Bergson said that laughter suspends emotion and that makes reflection arise pure and without interference. And that is where a Bardem is applied that transforms itself to a place two steps away from the miracle. From the rhythmic click of the tongue to the way of tilting the head through those agonizingly hearty hugs,
everything seems like the perfect description of the hilarious and very sad at the same time nonsense in which we are.
What remains is a film, but also an event that no one is spared: neither the workers without conscience nor the conscious businessmen nor the politicians are from the right or from the left, nor are the journalists made of paper or digital, nor are they jurors with or without club.
Nobody.
It is a party and a wake.
Whatever we get, we are designed to look ridiculous and that, with Bergson, makes us distance ourselves from the facts, no matter
how brutal,
and we get closer to others.
Even at wakes.
Especially there.
Call it a masterpiece or pure fetish.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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