I have a hard time exaggerating my sadness at the cultural paralysis of the country these days when a few months ago I myself wished just that from this column. What if we stopped Culture for a year? I proposed to them in that premonitory piece. One dreamed that there were not so many news of everything, so many new books and movies, in order to calm the soul and give itself to the Culture with the aim of a heroin addict. Now we live that dystopia, a Culture without additives, without sweeteners, without promotional anabolics, standing still in marble. It is sad, yes, but it is.
I do not know about you, but nostalgia has come to see me and I do not stop think of past and better times, and watching movies that remind me of them. I saw myself the first Tarantino and I saw myself in the perfumed cinemas of the 90s in Madrid, when it was the capital of evil and I, like any young man, was evil. One thing youth has is that it is easily counterfeited, and we were all where we had to be and we did what had to be done in those years when we may not even leave the house.
From Tarantino I went on to other bloods and satans, and thus I fell flat on my face with ‘El día de la bestia’ (1995), the second feature film by Alex of the Church. After seeing it, I entered Imdb and displayed the fatal connections of the present, where were each other, where yourself, pandemic and celestial. Twenty-five silver years had passed since its premiere, and one could fully understand Jaime Gil de Biedma: “Now that almost almost twenty years ago …”.
Anniversary
‘The day of the beast’ was a cultural event and, after a quarter of a century, everything in the film means life. That culture becomes life with the passage of time is -It just occurred to me- art itself.
Because ‘The day of the beast’ presents, at first, a crazy story of a priest looking for the manger where the Antichrist will be born in Madrid, and allying himself with a long-haired Carabanchel to commit infanticide ‘ad portas’ and rid the world of the Evil One. The event is dirty and bloody, full of humor, shooting, anxiety and haste. Everything is in a hurry, emergency, and one cannot believe how interesting the apocalypse is.
Not everyone, like Álex de la Iglesia, can sign a city without betraying it
But, behind the plot and the incendiary dialogues, and the blows and nudges and shots and kicks like never before had been filmed in the entire history of Spanish cinema, there is the nineties being judged, recorded and interpreted. The day of the beast speaks, above all, of specific and forgotten years, of its fears and its fatalities, of what was a country in the last alley of the century.
Not everyone knows how to film a city without betraying it. Madrid they have filmed it well Almodovar, Amenabar in ‘Abre los ojos’ and Álex de la Iglesia, for sticking with active filmmakers. Just look at ‘Truman’, from Cesc Gay, to see how you can humiliate a city: making it look like Barcelona. The day of the beast does not portray a Madrid that looks like New York, as they say, but a Madrid where big things seem to be happening. The vertiginous planes of the Gran Vía and the luminous one of Schweppes are the result of a monumental story, because here we are not talking about two friends who drink coffee and fall in love with the same girl, but about the birth of Satan and the end of the world. This is how the city becomes big, telling great stories in it.
But a city and an epoch are also told in the short shot, the gibberish and the detail. ‘The day of the beast’ returns the pampering, the propaganda dealers, the works of the mayor Álvarez del Manzano; a simple Metro entrance, the Christmas horror, signs of bars and shops when they were bars and shops, and not resignified delicatessen where only cereals or ice creams are served.
From FNAC to La Central
There is a scene where the priest, Alex Angulo, is going to buy a book. Go to the Fnac. For the young viewer, it is any kind of bookstore of the time. The truth is that the Fnac had just opened, and it was the latest in modernity, carpeting and CDs at a discounted price. Who did not fall in love with himself the first four times he entered the Fnac and saw young people in green vests swarm between shelves? Even to steal books the Fnac was preferred. Today, friends, the Fnac is not cool and that scene would have been filmed in La Central.
For five seconds, in addition, in that sequence a secondary appears that opens and closes a door. Antonio de la Torre He needed time to fall on him, and made a dent and disdain to end up starring today half of the Spanish cinema that is worth.
The Antichrist has chosen Madrid to be born and not the usual city of all extraterrestrial invasions (New York, of course)
The plot of the film constantly plays to incorporate into the path of its protagonists everything that in the 90s was front page news, so that it “demonizes”, in every sense, the time. Thus, the attacks on beggars and immigrants by the ‘skin heads’ appear here and there and end up being fundamental in the outcome. The Torres Kío, singularly, become an exact symbol of the coming of the Devil, when in the 90s they represented triumphant capitalism rising, very modestly, that is, in the city. In fact, it comes to be explained that the Antichrist has chosen Madrid to be born and not the usual city of all extraterrestrial invasions and all incomparable adventures (New York, of course) because in it horrifying events, such as robbing babies, continue to occur, desecration of graves, proliferation of healers and soothsayers, and murders. To which must be added the Almodovarian touch of pensions and civil guards and the television shack.
If ‘Mutant Action’ left us with an insuperable description of Spanish society (“Everyone is silly or modern”), El día de la bestia has its own memorable currency, which almost seems to redeem us from the previous one: “Are you satanic? “” Yes; and Carabanchel. “
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