Cinema and television
Dictionary of Spanish Cinema, 1950-1990 (4). The stroller (1960), de Marco Ferreri
By Carlos Losilla
Last film that the Italian Marco Ferreri shot in Spain, The stroller (1960) belongs to that large group of grotesque comedies made in the country between the late 1950s and early 1960s, including other masterpieces such as The executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1963) or The strange journey (Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1964). Ferreri had landed in Spanish lands four years earlier, as a commercial representative for film camera lenses, and immediately met the writer and screenwriter Rafael Azcona, with whom he began a fruitful collaboration. Thus, after The little flat (1958) and Boys (1959), culminated this memorable opening trilogy with The stroller, where the story is told of an old man (José Isbert) obsessed with getting a vehicle for the disabled like that of some of his friends, despite not having any disability, convinced that this will allow him not only greater mobility, but also all his definitive integration in the group. Such a far-fetched argument, however, did not limit itself to indulging in that black humor so Spanish, locatable somewhere lost between Goya’s work and Valle-Inclán’s. Then The stroller it is also a film about its time, the ruthless portrait of a country and people trapped in times of misery.
In principle, Ferreri resorts to a language that seems clear and transparent: distant, long, contemplative shots that draw a naturalism accentuated by filming in natural settings, in the wake of Italian neorealism. However, little by little everything takes on a different air and situations begin to follow a strange logic, halfway between the verista document and existential reflection. In this sense, The stroller It is not limited to giving an account of a few insignificant lives, nor is its ultimate purpose to expose a reality that the official cinema of the regime refused to show. Ferreri’s film is very clear that he is dealing with human beings, no matter how crazy their behavior, and his main intention is very different: we are dealing with the chronicle of a desire that has never been satisfied, a radical critique of illusion as the driving force behind behavior. human. Don Anselmo will fight against reality tirelessly, he will face his family and even the laws in order to get what he wants, without realizing that the limitations and prohibitions that prevent him from satisfying his instincts do not only have to do with morals and with the rules of conduct, but above all with his status as a citizen of a civilization in decline.
Ferreri developed this theme extensively in his later career in Italy and France, from the gastronomic apocalypse of Feast (1973) to the feminist manifesto of The future is woman (1984), going through the regression from man to ape staged in Goodbye to the male (1978). Nevertheless, The stroller, seen as a gloss and summary of his first period, it contains some elements that have more to do with his Spanish contemporaries than with that European cinema in which he will later enroll. Choral prominence, for example, will find its peak in the Berlanga de Placid (1961) and the aforementioned The executioner. And his eschatological streak, sometimes highly aggressive, will be conveniently reformulated in Francisco Regueiro’s cinema, especially in Sleep, sleep my love (1975) and Blanca’s wedding (1975). However, nothing more defining the Ferrerian style in its passage through Spain than those planes of The stroller crowded with characters, in which all speak and gesticulate at the same time, in an immense gibberish that could refer both to the condition of that country that he contemplated with distant foreigner eyes, as to that historical moment in which even language was beginning to stop being an instrument of communication.
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