The last two films of the filmmaker ‘Lesx de la Iglesia’ were released at about the same time, Bar and Perfect Unknowns debuted in 2017, but the impact of each of them was quite different, while the first had a little more discreet recipe, the latter became the director’s most profitable film.
The remake’s plot, Perfect Unknowns, may be more appealing to mass audiences, but the truth is that it somehow loses the essence of the director. The Bar, on the other hand, is much closer to the particular style than the work of the Church. Lex’s gotten used to us.
- A wild.
- Crazy and violent style.
- In which the worst instincts are revealed.
- From the Church you feel at ease in this neighborhood bar and in this grotesque scenario in which the action will take place.
- He is in the midst of it.
- At the essence of his cinema and his success.
- Something that.
- On the other hand.
- Goes against the director himself.
- This convenience leads you to trust.
- To rely a lot on your film and on the fact that anything.
- However unlikely and repetitive.
- Can succeed.
From the Church has left us accustomed to a heterogeneous cast that works very well, but usually weakens at the end, at the end of his films. The succession of crazy facts can be fascinating, but it can also become absurd and difficult to bear. Personally, I can say that The Bar is a nice and entertaining film with a really engaging story. However, it can end up becoming fatigoso, becoming a feature film that does not shine in the filmmaker’s filmography, a work that is “more or less the same”.
On a normal morning, in the center of gigantic Madrid, a group of people have breakfast in a bar without major problems, some know each other, others simply pass, as a result, normality is interrupted by something tragic: a person. just died, shot, at the door of the bar. Urban chaos disappears, the city seems deserted and this group of people is trapped inside the bar.
The Bar has an interesting plot, as well as deepening and designing the characters well. As if it were a reflection of society, De la Iglesia managed to capture the truth behind the mask, the nature that we hide behind the roles we play in society.
The bar we see in the film is a common bar, like the others, without any particular charm, this bar is frequented by locals, who will have breakfast in the morning, or people who, like Elena, will never enter. But known space will interact with the characters that bring the film to life.
Marc Augé is a French anthropologist who is credited with creating the term “non-place. “What exactly is a non-place? It is a place of passage, a place where identity does not manifest itself, an artificial communication space, which offers nothing for the individual, Augé identifies roads, hotel rooms, airplanes, etc. , as not places, that is, places where we stay for a short period of time, with which we will barely interact and from which we will hardly extract meaningful relationships. .
Non-place opposes the anthropological place, the place where identity resides; non-places are spaces of transit, in constant motion; spaces from which contemporary society is more than full; whether a given space is a non-place or not. Totally subjective. It will depend on what this place means for each individual and the interaction we have with them. There are people who see these spaces as a kind of crossing, of exchange.
Thus, the setting of the Church film is a bar with a considerable flow and degree of exchange, a no place in a city that continues to grow and move, a place of anonymity for many and a refuge for others. We’re introduced to Elena, a young woman who walks into the bar just to charge her cell phone, we also met Trini, a client who goes to the bar every day to play slots.
Elena and Trini are not the only characters found in the small space, a total of 8 characters will remain blocked in this location. Thex of Church has already shown his taste for claustrophobia by arresting a group of people in a place where they could not leave and where they would live extreme situations, in this sense he has already published titles such as A Comunidade and A Minha. Grande Noite. For obvious reasons, the film has not escaped comparisons with one of the great Films in Spanish: The Exterminating Angel of Luis Buunuel (1962).
The bar starts in a small space where the conversations are not very deep; a place that, for each character, represents something different, a space that will freeze at the frenetic rhythm of the contemporary city.
The Bar is a good caricature of today’s Spain, as it perfectly reflects the customs of its society. The characters are as varied as possible: a homeless man; a rich but extremely insecure young woman; a middle-aged, normal-looking woman who is addicted to gambling; a nonconformist young man; a former policeman who was expelled from society for alcohol problems; Etc.
As the situation becomes more desperate, the characters will show up as they really are. The Spanish philosopher Eugenio Treas discusses these issues in his work Filosofa and Carnival (Filosofa and Carnival, in free translation). roles that society itself has assigned us. These roles are varied, we do not act in the same way in all situations, nor do we project the same image.
That is precisely what we see in the film, like the example we present to them, that of Elena, we see that the young woman does not act in the same way when she talks on the mobile phone with her friend and when she enters the bar In the same way, all the characters present a certain duality: the image they project, in the face of the secrets that hide others.
This masquerade is a reflection of our world, of the bars to which we go every day, of modern cities where identities are increasingly varied. Interestingly, the character whose identity remains increasingly stable is Israel, the homeless person. Israel does not seem to belong to the same world as others. It turns out to be a man who must have had several problems in the past, but who at no time tries to deceive us.
As the situation becomes desperate, all characters will struggle to survive. They will fight for their individual survival, regardless of the others. In the midst of this “save yourself who you can”, the masks dissolve, showing the hypocrisy present in our world. However, Israel does not remove the mask, or at least it does so to a lesser extent. For what? Simply because Israel is not trying to please anyone, it does not want to project a distorted image of itself.
Are they the ones that exclude the most authentic ones? Israel is already in a desperate situation, already fighting every day for its survival; Therefore, it is somehow excluded from society and therefore does not wear a mask. Between eschatological, comical and tragic, O Bar leads us to a demonstration of nature in its purest form, in its most animal state, a situation in which the survival instinct prevails over morality and social norms. By unmasking the characters, we witness the worst facets of the human being, the nature of our being in an extreme situation.
“Let your wishes be fulfilled, my friends, and you will conquer human nature. “- Charles Dickens-