Newcomer directors Nacho A. Villar and Luis Rojo present at the Seville Film Festival a prodigy of truthful and political cinema built without condescension in which the humiliated take the voice to tell themselves without intermediaries or charitable gestures
Deca the recently deceased Jean-Luc Godard that cinema is a sign and signs are among us. And one step further, but always just as cryptic and ironic, he added: “Cinema is the only thing that has given us a sign. The others have given us orders.” “The Bad Family” the film of debutant directors Nacho A. Villar and Luis Rojo Presented these days at the Seville Festival within the New Waves section, it is essentially a sign. Or, if you prefer, a simple signal, a call for help or, in the last case, the most obvious gesture of survival. “Process of life”, they prefer to say the directors themselves. What is not in any case this film so close to the prodigy is an order, an imposition or the umpteenth story of a pious, condescending and compressive narrator with the miseries of others. The entire film is built on the certainty of his honesty, on the almost shameless exhibition of the word made flesh in an almost radical sense, which is not necessarily mystical.
The story of a group of friends is told. All, or almost, immigrants (whether real or unexpected) in a Spain that is so unique to them, so close and indistinguishable from what they are and what they want to be, as it is bitterly hostile. They haven’t seen each other for a long time and, taking advantage of the prison leave of one of them (Andresito), they decide to meet up. See each other to tell each other, to remember each other, to celebrate each other, to feel close to the rhythm of reggaeton and grilled chops. The grace and meaning of this proposal launched in the face of the viewer as a true provocation lies in the reflexive nature of the verbs and of the cinematographic proposal itself. Everything that happens to this group of working-class men in the film happens to them through them: they film themselves, so to speak, in the very act of recognizing themselves. Cinema, suddenly, becomes what the Frenchman from above said: a sign as the first step of emancipation and even liberation.
The directors say that the story they tell matters to them because it is nothing more than the story of their lives. Things that count. For God knows what crime that is never described in the film, all of them are sentenced to pay compensation or a fine on a monthly basis for an incident from the past. And around this debt ties are braided, recriminations are generated and the sense of what is closest to a friendship is built. A friendship through time that is, it has already been said, a sign.
The filmmakers belong to the audiovisual collective BRBR (lase ‘berber’, which, in their own words, is nothing more than “a tribe of free men that the Romans saw as barbarians”). It could be said that the meaning of everything else is found in the ideology of its denomination. It is basically about appropriating the tool of cinema to turn it into its own word, into a word that insists on not representing anything or anyone other than itself. The audience is not summoned to a new film about emigration, redemption, guilt or punishment produced from the good will of the committed filmmaker. Now the one who speaks does not tell anything foreign; he who speaks tells himself. And it is there, in that game of visceral self-representation where everything makes sense. It is not a curative or cathartic work or a film for denunciation and good feelings. Although there is something of all this. It is basically a film pronounced from the only voice in a position to give truth to what is narrated because it narrates itself.
As it advances ‘The bad family’ what begins as a party is rushing towards lands that are both darker and flooded with light; more sour and more authentic. Directors say that for them the film expands beyond the screen. And as proof of their assertion, they recall that one of the protagonists who says he had been in jail looking at the camera is now, in effect, in jail again. Let’s say that this desire to make the viewer’s gaze embrace the other side of the screen is precisely what makes ‘The bad family’ in such a genuine, peculiar and, in its own way, dazzling film exercise. In the best year of Spanish cinema in decades, suddenly, its starkest proposal.
Very early on, back in the 1960s when Godard from above reigned, the idea was not so much to experiment with the limits of cinema as to find the emancipatory mechanism of representation. The idea was to discuss the hierarchy that places the creator on one side and the viewer on the other. What was sought with this cinema that recorded the demonstrations, the political discussions at the factory, the confrontations with the police or the activity of the Action Committees was not to compose a simple document that was more or less realistic, more or less testimonial. What mattered was the taking of the word, the very questioning of, once again, the representation. If what is claimed is “the indignity of speaking for others”, what counts is the reappropriation of the meaning of each previously imposed image. Representation, ultimately, is only intelligible through an active exercise of self-representation.
And it is in this ideology where, suddenly, ‘The bad family’ bursts like a revelation that he will call the cinema of Isaki Lacuesta than to Jean Eustache’s than to Joaqum Jord’s than to a new territory where technology finally allows no one to have to take orders anymore. The signs are there and the cinema is one of them. The result is a portrait as truthful as it is colossal on issues such as rootlessness, humiliation, exploitation, masculinity, friendship, the feeling of loss and power. And the weather. And all this without being kidnapped neither the voice nor the word. Never before has the cinema been so cruelly radiantly political.
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‘The bad family’, the drama and glory of the forgotten in the first person and without ‘progressive’ paternalism