Alberto Rodriguez is one of the best film directors in Spain. I’m not saying it, his own work speaks for him: even those most reluctant to admit that there is also a good filmography in our country turn to ‘La isla minima’ or ‘Grupo 7’. He knows how to play the keys that make a movie both character portrait and fun for the general public, spectacularity and social criticism in a mix that has improved to almost perfection.
‘Model 77’ falls into prison topics, yes: what’s more, sometimes he bathes in them without shame. But at the same time is shot with a steady hand, shockingly well-directed sequences and a group of actors who, Miguel Herrán aside (very clueless, who seems to be in another script), could easily sweep any awards gala this year. If you’re ready to go behind bars, put on your suit and prepare for a review of the beginning of democracy from the least expected place: the Model of Madrid.
Amnesty, freedom!
‘Model 77’ is a prison film, with all that that entails: this is not ‘Two years and a day’ and cannot afford to ignore police abuses at the time of the Transition. You are going to see everything you are waiting for: the prison yard, the stabbings, the surprise searches, the beatings, the nights in the solitary cell… But the tape he flatly refuses to stay in the simpleton portrait that we’ve seen a thousand times before, and the typical prison platitudes are just the packaging for a fascinating character study in a place and time that cinema hasn’t fully explored.
It is true that Manuel, the protagonist, is going to shoot: his character evolution happens fortuitously at the beginning of the film and his emotional swings are a small annoyance for the rhythm of the film, which lives in his shadow. But next to him are a good bunch of secondaries with his own life, his pains, his longing for freedom, betrayals, contradictions and, ultimately, life.
The prisoners of the Alberto Rodríguez prison feel alive at all times, they speak like people, relate to each other and behave like human beings deprived of liberty but not intelligence. If the easy thing would have been to fall into the Malamadre on duty (without contempt for the stupendous ‘Cell 211’), here we have Pino, an accommodating prisoner used to being behind bars who has made his life out of the cell and who does not consider it, out of sheer despair, go outside. Javier Gutiérrez plays one of the best roles of his life putting a face to the most fascinating character in the film and one of the most incredible in Spanish cinema in recent years, who in each whisper (“I leave you locked up outside, bastards”) expresses more than hundreds of actors screaming inconsolably.
Between bars
Rodríguez does not want to tell a biopic, nor does he need it. Setting the film in the Model, in the mid-70s, the historical context itself is worth and is left over to tell dozens of small stories of history that it matters little whether they are based on real events or are pure fiction: the moral problem of the dangerous prisoners who also asked for amnesty, the cold-blooded murder by officials, the internal revolution, the desire for change in a gray weather… Although it sounds, once again, a cliché, the historical context is the true protagonist of the film.
Gray. That is the color that defines ‘Model 77’, a representation of the society of the time: democracy had arrived, yes, but those who ruled were still the usual ones. And it is this contradiction, which at first the film itself refuses to accept and then prop up infuriatinglythe one that gives the film a somber tone, of continuous pain, of loss of hope: even when the prisoners take two steps forward, the batons and political impunity make them take three steps back.
Not everything is a bed of roses during the viewing of a film that is too long, of course: the director turns his work into something very different in its final minutes, making the prison political drama dresses up as an action thriller which, despite his solvency, does him no good. The dramatic tension disappears completely, the characters are simple caricatures of what they were, eliminating their nuances with a stroke of the pen, as if in a hurry to finish. It’s a shame, because if it weren’t for these last moments, ‘Model 77’ would be an outstanding film, second only to ‘The Minimum Island’ in the director’s career.
A grand opening
‘Model 77’ is spectacular in its development thanks to a direction that never avoids the spectacular: It could have been a movie full of silences and tears, but instead the camera is always moving, the plot never stops taking another twist and the script is vibrant, full of lapidary phrases and moments that, based on real events, is capable of creating a fabulous Cañí recreation.
We haven’t seen each other at the San Sebastian Festival for a long time an opening as powerful as thisa first-rate film and one of the clearest examples that the history of Spain It is full of small moments that give rise to great, great stories.. ‘Model 77’ is a film that came with great expectations and, luckily, it more than meets them. Nothing to envy anyone, no matter how hard some insist, once again.