Send is an uncomfortable verb and, in haste, contradictory. Hegel, in his effort to order progress towards the absolute (self-consciousness, he said), decided to make use of the parable, which in essence is nothing more than a paradox of the dialectical relationship between master and slave. The grace of the matter, so as not to lose ourselves, is that
the relationship of dependence between the one who commands and the one who obeys is so unstable that it is condemned to fail in a three-way dance of affirmation, denial and negation of denial
. And so. After all, humans more than want things, we want wishes. And that, indeed, gives a lot of war.
Let's say that
Fernando León de Aranoa's
The Good Pattern
is Hegelian rather than Marxist. And it is because of its clarity when it comes to locking everyone, masters and slaves, employers and workers, in a dead end that is nothing more than a pure contradiction.
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, well 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 tape tells us and even Hegel - the perverse and self-exclusive mechanics of desire can do everything. No one escapes the logic of the eagerness that is consumed in the festive celebration of consumption. All slaves of our desire to be masters. 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 lose their sense of balance. 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 simply good. Although that leads to the worst of evils.
They all live entangled in a game of entanglements in which the master ends up being the slave of his desires and the servant owner and lord of his emptiness.
What remains is a film from which no one comes out unscathed: neither the workers without conscience nor the employers very conscious of their absence of conscience.
Nobody.
It's a party and a wake
Almost 20 years after
Monday in the sun
, León de Aranoa is now struggling to show the reverse of that.
If the first 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 folksy.
Let's say your problem is one of overidentity or, more Hegelian, of supervening self-consciousness.
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 highly contradictory integrity. 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 used
to be
Santa and now is Blanco
in
Los Mondays in the Sun
is close to the proverbial. Pure spirit. Each gesture is there to draw the outline of a cliff. From the rhythmic click of the tongue to the way of tilting the head through those hugs so agonizingly warm, everything seems like the perfect description of the hilarious and very sad at the same time nonsense in which we are. And that is where
a Bardem
is applied
that transforms itself into a place two steps away from the miracle.
The fucking master, what would Hegel say?
What remains is
a film from which no one comes out unscathed
: neither the workers without conscience nor the employers very conscious of their absence of conscience (negation of the negation);
not politicians, right or left;
nor the journalists, be they column or teletypewriter;
nor sworn guards, with or without truncheon.
Nobody.
It is a party and a wake.
We are all masters for slaves.
And backwards.
Nobody is in charge here.
Hegel, say something.
+ About Javier Bardem, I don't know if it has become clear, it is not from this world.-Bardem's overabundance ends up obscuring characters who perhaps would have deserved more.
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