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Jan. 17th, 2013 10:09 am
Miercoles en el sofá
I can no longer remember for certain who recommended I watch Los lunes al sol (Mondays in the sun). Probably Diego, as he's also got a big chubby for Luis Tosar and Javier Bardem. In fact it was uncanny how much Bardem with a beard resembles Diego's boyfriend Uncle Betty (that is, if you ignore for a moment that the actor is almost a full head taller). In any case, it finally floated to the top of the NetFlix queue, so I popped it in yesterday evening.
The supplemental making-of feature states that the film is "not based on a true story; it is based on thousands". [The phrase turns better in Spanish where "a" and "one" are the same word.] And that's the movie's biggest flaw: we've seen this before. Not a thousand times, to be sure, but at times it seems that way. Working class middle-aged men struggle with unemployment in a depressed industrial city. The only really fresh element is that this time around the city is Vigo in Galicia, which means a lot of striking wide shots of the harbour.
In Brassed off, the idle proles poured their energies into playing music; in The full Monty, it was dance routines. Here it's drinking. The movie centres on a grotty pub run by one of the lucky ex-dockworkers who used his severance pay to open it--though how it stays open is a mystery to me, since the only customers seem to be his deadbeat former workmates. Chief among the deadbeats is Bardem's character, who swaggers around like the whole town owes him a living because he broke a streetlight during the protests against the closing of the dockyard.
There are some very tender scenes between several of the main characters, who literally seem to be clinging onto each other for dear life. (In one of the most crushing, a wife has a bag packed to leave her alcoholic husband, but after his morbid ramblings convince her that would be his death sentence, she reconsiders.) But there's not really any overall arch. In order to achieve some kind of conclusion, the filmmakers have to simply kill off one of the characters.
This is all making it sound pretty dull and depressing, which it likely would be for the average viewer. I can't honestly say how engrossed I would've been had I not been treating it as a language lesson and watching it in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. Actually, the language is pretty simple; at one point, I rewatched Bardem's climactic barroom speech with the English text to see if I'd missed anything and found that I really hadn't. The only outstanding characteristic of the dialogue is how many times they manage to say "joder" and "gilipollas" over less than two hours of running time.
I couldn't really hear anything distinctly Galician about the accents, despite the fact that three of the principals (including Tosar but not the Canarian Bardem) are galegos. There's not much local colour in general, as if the Madrid-born director were at pains to make this Everytown, Spain for maximum relatability. It's beautifully shot, and I could watch Bardem indefinitely doing whatever. Nieve de Medina and Aida Folch are given juicy roles--or at least what passes for them in an androcentric exercise like this--but I still feel there's nothing I got from this movie I couldn't have gotten in more intriguing form elsewhere.
The supplemental making-of feature states that the film is "not based on a true story; it is based on thousands". [The phrase turns better in Spanish where "a" and "one" are the same word.] And that's the movie's biggest flaw: we've seen this before. Not a thousand times, to be sure, but at times it seems that way. Working class middle-aged men struggle with unemployment in a depressed industrial city. The only really fresh element is that this time around the city is Vigo in Galicia, which means a lot of striking wide shots of the harbour.
In Brassed off, the idle proles poured their energies into playing music; in The full Monty, it was dance routines. Here it's drinking. The movie centres on a grotty pub run by one of the lucky ex-dockworkers who used his severance pay to open it--though how it stays open is a mystery to me, since the only customers seem to be his deadbeat former workmates. Chief among the deadbeats is Bardem's character, who swaggers around like the whole town owes him a living because he broke a streetlight during the protests against the closing of the dockyard.
There are some very tender scenes between several of the main characters, who literally seem to be clinging onto each other for dear life. (In one of the most crushing, a wife has a bag packed to leave her alcoholic husband, but after his morbid ramblings convince her that would be his death sentence, she reconsiders.) But there's not really any overall arch. In order to achieve some kind of conclusion, the filmmakers have to simply kill off one of the characters.
This is all making it sound pretty dull and depressing, which it likely would be for the average viewer. I can't honestly say how engrossed I would've been had I not been treating it as a language lesson and watching it in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. Actually, the language is pretty simple; at one point, I rewatched Bardem's climactic barroom speech with the English text to see if I'd missed anything and found that I really hadn't. The only outstanding characteristic of the dialogue is how many times they manage to say "joder" and "gilipollas" over less than two hours of running time.
I couldn't really hear anything distinctly Galician about the accents, despite the fact that three of the principals (including Tosar but not the Canarian Bardem) are galegos. There's not much local colour in general, as if the Madrid-born director were at pains to make this Everytown, Spain for maximum relatability. It's beautifully shot, and I could watch Bardem indefinitely doing whatever. Nieve de Medina and Aida Folch are given juicy roles--or at least what passes for them in an androcentric exercise like this--but I still feel there's nothing I got from this movie I couldn't have gotten in more intriguing form elsewhere.