With half a million spectators and more than 3 million euros raised, more than the great film in English by Pedro Almodóvar, ‘El 47’ has been one of the phenomena of the season. A success that has been rewarded with up to 14 Goya nominations, including the Best Film Award. Is it, therefore, the favorite? It cannot be stated when its director, Marcel Barrena, has missed the nomination. Something that is fully justified.
‘El 47’ adapts the true story of Manolo Vital, a bus driver, a migrant of Extremaduran origin, who fought in the 70s for public transport to reach Torre Baró, one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in Barcelona. One may have the image that Barcelona is a city a thousand times more progressive than Madrid, but that nonsense took its toll during the transition. Like ‘I’m loving you madly’ a season earlier, ‘El 47’ has anticipated the splendor of celebrating 50 years of freedom in Spain, remembering the deficiencies that Francoism had left us in terms of equality and infrastructure.
The excellent prologue, tense in its picaresque, and in which Eduard Fernández and especially Clara Segura already shine, is a way like any other to dismantle that “with Franco one lived better.” As if it were obligatory for this reason, ‘El 47’ soon falls into all the vices of Spanish social cinema, eons after such imaginative proposals as ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’. Here all the characters are bad-bad or heroes; The ending and the way to reach it could not be more predictable; and the approaches to secondary characters that could have been as interesting as the character of Carlos Cuevas or that of the daughter Zoe Bonafonte, like many other things in the script, are mere brushstrokes. Something that appears and disappears; that could be like not having been at all.
Marcel Barrena takes a risk by offering archive images when filming goes down to the center of Barcelona, a decision that damages the verisimilitude of the remaining footage, in addition to certain rarities that have been highly questioned on social networks. Do Extremadurans who have migrated to poor neighborhoods really speak that much Catalan? Was Torre Baró really so little paved in 1978? We can call it “dramatic licenses”, more justifiable than the way in which the key scenes have been shot: zero tension in the mountain climbing scene, and zero tension in the fire scene, in which you won’t even know what character is on fire if you haven’t turned on the subtitles.
That sound continues to be a theme in a certain type of Spanish cinema is proof that some things do not evolve over time. It seems like a metaphor for the numbing of the collective conscience about the power of the people when it comes to fighting social injustices. Aside from the beautiful original song composed by Valeria Castro, which I hope wins the Goya, almost as beautiful as Chico Sánchez Ferlosio’s ‘Gallo rojo, gallo negro’ that is claimed; The best thing about ‘El 47’ is that it highlights the power of neighborhood associations to promote public affairs. Not through slogans as empty as “only the people save the people”, but by pressuring the institutions so that public transport reaches everywhere, so that trees are not cut down to build something stupid, so that tourist apartments are regulated. .
