‘The dinner’: the blessed laughter of ridicule and bitterness with Franco and his facades | Cinema: premieres and reviews

Some of the most tragic situations in the history of humanity have given rise to some of the best comedies in the history of cinema. Knowing how to look to see where, in addition to drama, ridicule can be found, and with it laughter, has always been essential when approaching the most extraordinary events. Then all that remains is to provide the color most appropriate to the story, its background and its forms: the refined and elegant white that does not want to draw blood; the black and white of dramatic comedy; the cruel black of laughter that freezes because of modesty and even shame.

José Luis Alonso de Santos was able to glimpse it in his play The generals’ dinner, set a couple of weeks after the end of the Spanish Civil War and the definitive fall of Republican Madrid. The playwright from Valladolid came up with the happy and overwhelming idea that, in the midst of tragedy, misery, death and degradation, perhaps Franco would have wanted to celebrate the victory with his lieutenants at a luxurious meal at the Palace hotel. And he added the last straw that could break the camel’s back: laughter and pain, the absurd grimace and the unprejudiced smile. The agape is impossible because all the cooks are in prison. For reds. So you have to get them out of there for a while.

Written in 1998, although it was not performed until a decade later, The generals’ dinner is now converted into a film by Manuel Gómez Pereira, king of laughter in Spanish cinema in the nineties with five films in six years that brought, between farce and high comedy, an average of close to a million spectators per title: Pink sauce, Why do they call it love when they mean sex?, All men are equal, Mouth to mouth and Love seriously harms health. Pereira, who at the beginning of this year began to regain the public’s warmth with the remake A funeral of madmen, after too many years of uneven career after the resounding critical and public failure of Out of tune, turning point after the triumphs, he has returned with his script cronies from then – Joaquín Oristrell and Yolanda García Serrano – to adapt Alonso de Santos. The result is a wonderful comedy that elegantly weaves together the need for memory, the value of dignity, the nobility of the ideals of freedom, the heartbreak of tragedy and the luminous laughter of ridicule.

Without ever underlining the gags not even the funniest phrases, articulating a staging that, from a certain distance, clearly marks the intertwining of the contrast between the pageantry of the Palace and the physical, economic, sentimental and moral poverty of its creatures, Pereira and his cronies have pruned some parts of Alonso de Santos’ work and added a primordial plot for development. And they have decided to paint their film with the black and white of the dramatic comedy, without mixing both in situations that could have given rise to merciless blackness, but always maintaining, despite the hints of a smile and the pleasant entertainment, a necessary bitterness that underlies its elegance, also commanded by two formidable performers: Mario Casas and Alberto San Juan, who nail every line of the script (How do you know? can say a phrase that arouses as much disgust as ‘Up with Spain!’ with so much grace!), with the contagious humanity of a certain national reconciliation that, at the same time, never forgets what happened and who the culprits were.

A touch of humanism with nuances, of weak but critical laughter, which connects perfectly with another great painful comedy of Spanish cinema, inspired by real events —The apple of your eye, by Fernando Trueba—and, saving some distances, with different styles of revelry in times of war: the very carnal Italian of Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini and Dino Risi in the spectacular The Great War, Everyone Home y The march on Rome, respectively; and the refinement of Ernst Lubitsch in To be or not to be. Maybe Dinner goes a little from more to less, and the presence of the dictator is somewhat wasted, but Gómez Pereira recovers a type of political comedy for Spanish cinema that should never have been forgotten.