historias del kronen (w&d montxo armendáriz, w. josé ángel mañas)

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. 

27 horas (w&d montxo armendáriz w. elías querejeta)

San Sebastian today has an affluent feel. Famed for its gastronomy and its cultural life. A tourist hotspot, an exclusive European enclave. Armendáriz’s film opens with a tracking shot, presumably filmed from a helicopter, of the bay of San Sebastian, with its beaches and waterfront, homing in on a clock which gives the time as 7am. It’s the start of a tragic 27 hours in the life of the film’s protagonist, Jan, a charismatic student junkie. Only this isn’t now, it’s back before the euro existed, when San Sebastian was still a fishing town, suffering from economic decline. The film tells the story of Jon and Maite, a pair of doomed Burroughsian lovers. Maite is played by Maribel Verdú, who would later figure as the object of the lust of Bernal and Luna in Y Tu Mama También, and a young Antonio Banderas also has a cameo, suggesting that Armendáriz was a great talent spotter. Their lowkey junkie lifestyle is juxtaposed with life in the city, where unemployment is high, riots are commonplace, and the only possibilities are to work in the fishing industry.

The film depicts this industry with a documentary flourish, getting in on the quayside and the fish market. The way that daily life in the city is captured, the bars and the dark, damp streets, is convincing. European naturalism blending with heightened Spanish drama. Cinema’s capacity to reveal the world as it is, the moment the camera runs, is one of its core strengths, something that doesn’t require a vast budget. The contrast between San Sebastián then and today is astonishing. Spain as it emerged from Franquismo was a far cry from the turbo-charged euro economy it possesses, or aspires to possess, today. Maite’s apartment overlooks the sea, and one imagines that today it would be worth a small fortune; likewise a meal in the restaurant that Jon’s parents run in a medieval quarter of the city would probably now be enough for a month’s worth of Jon’s fix. In which case it might be argued that things are better now than they were then, although it hasn’t stopped the youth from feeling disenfranchised and resorting to drugs to help them get through their days and nights.

27 Horas makes a great companion piece to Saura’s Deprisa, Deprisa. Also worth noting the brilliance of the table-football scene, where Jon plays against Banderas’ Rafa, his dealer and love rival for Maite. The table-football match is imbued with the drama of a penalty shoot-out and the skill of the players as they manipulate the stick-men is perfectly realised. It elevates this simple bar game into something epic, laced with an absurd humour. The young Banderas is great and you can see the seeds of his stardom being planted.

Finally: not a word of Euskari is spoken, so far as I could discern. The politics is implicit in the presence of the police and the riots at the edge of the story, but the film focuses on the issue of the disaffection of youth, rather than the wider causes of this disaffection. Having said which the scene where Yan is driven out into the middle of a riot is brilliantly filmed.