In these times everything but quiet Manuel Gómez Pereira brings us back to one of the darkest moments of Spanish history with A dinner with the dictator, a light and sharp culinary comedy. The film went out to the cinema on Thursday, April 9, promising laughs but also something to teach us about our present.
A cena con il dittatore: farsa pericolosa
Madrid, April 1939: the civil war ended, but left behind a Spain to shreds and a divided population. Lt. Medina is sent to the Hotel Palace, a luxurious hotel reduced to a field hospital, with the task of organizing a gala dinner for Franco and his generals in the evening. Medina is collaborating with the reluctant maître of the Palace, Genaro Palazón, who guides him in the series of logistic miracles necessary to put together the banquet, from pulling out of prison a brigade of communist chefs to obtain ingredients to the black market of a hungry Madrid. Irrimediately, dinner will become a center of gravity in which hopes of rebirth and personal fragility, remorse and regret, private rivalry and political conflicts will be met.
Funziona come film…
Let’s get off the formal comment so we can talk about important things. At dinner with the dictator is a comedy that works — not of the kind from laughter to crepapelle but it is a fresh, brilliant and farsighted movie. Teatral enough in the plant (and not by chance: it is based on the pièce La cena de los generales by José Luis Alonso De Santos), but it is very well maintained even in the more purely cinematographic aspects, sending us home with the impression of having looked at a product of excellent quality.
…ma non è questo il punto
The characters of A dinner with the dictator move in a world made of forces incommensorably larger than them: opposing chest is not only mortal, but substantially useless. Theirs is basically a gray-scale world, in which ideas count but, for the most part, another day is more important. But the way our culinary heroes deal with this impossibility to intervene mythically on reality (as they do, for example, Tarantino’s Gloryless Bastards) is the opposite of a step back: it is a step forward, but at the tip of feet. It is the continuous and indefatigable research of small spaces in which to recover a slice of freedom, in which to affirm its individuality, in which to continue to fight its battle.
Il cast
Alberto San Juan is Genaro Palazón, maître of the Palace that always tries to make good face at bad game, although Franco’s Spain is hostile to him. Mario Casas plays Lieutenant Medina, who became a soldier almost by accident and was trapped in his role, while Asier Etxeandia is his superior Alonso, a convinced and psychopathic phalayanist. Nora Hernández is María, waitress and singer of the Palace while Óscar Lasarte plays Ángel, her unproven boyfriend. Antonio Resines is Juana, indomitable head-cuoca (as well as mother of Ángel), while Ferrán Gadea, Eleazar Ortíz and Antonio Resines are his brigade of rebel chefs.
L’articolo Dinner with dictator: stamina at tip of feet — The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
