Kronen is a Madrid bar, and this film is an adaptation of Mañas’ novel of that name. It centres on a group of hedonist friends who meet there in the 90s, get wasted on beer, coke and 24 hour partying. There’s more than a hint of Brett Easton Ellis about all this, and the lead, Carlos, played by the striking Juan Diego Botto, is something of an American Psycho, a party boy who makes a merit out of his lack of morals or values. He’s beautiful, girls love him, he has his posse, but he’s also an out and out arsehole. Over the course of a Madrid summer he succeeds in pissing everyone off, capping it off with the manslaughter of one of his friends.
In truth this is more of a mood piece than a narrative piece. The film dwells on the hedonism of a generation liberated from the yoke of Franquismo their parents laboured under. (Although Bardem’s Calle Mayor perhaps shows a lifestyle not so dissimilar from 40 years earlier, just as Jonás Trueba’s La Virgen de Agosto also dwells on the idle pleasures of a Madrid summer.) Armendáriz delights in getting sweaty with his sexy young stars as they nightcrawl through the city. As the film ambles towards its predictable denouement, it starts to lose its shape. (On the evidence of this and 27 Hours, endings are not Armendáriz’s forte). Nevertheless, it offers a depiction of a new, apolitical generation, lost on the dance floor, with nothing left to fight for or care about.
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