‘El 47’: Next stop, the forgotten ones of the Transition

The citizen movements that emerged during the seventies in the neighbourhoods of the large Spanish cities around their neighbourhood groups, many of which took advantage of the legal loopholes of the late Franco regime, were at one time left outside the myth of the Transition. They were, however, as important on the road to democracy as women, countercultural youth or those stigmatised by the Law on Social Danger. The review of this historical void began more than a decade ago in essays, exhibitions and, now, films, by Model 77, by Alberto Rodriguez, to I’m loving you madlyby Alejandro Marín. With greater or lesser success, all these works sought to settle a debt with decisive groups in those times of change.

The 47Marcel Barrena’s film about the neighbourhood movement in Torre Baró, a suburb of Barcelona, ​​focuses on a very specific (real) event and its protagonist: the bus driver Manuel Vital and his stubborn demand for a public transport stop in Torre Baró. Remembering the feat of this neighbourhood hero is a good idea that works above all thanks to the performance of its main actor, Eduard Fernández, and the wonderful Clara Segura. Fernández passionately gets into the skin of this immigrant from Extremadura who, like all his neighbours in Torre Baró and many others, left his homeland in the post-war period fleeing hunger and the scourge of the reprisals of the Civil War to build a house with his own hands on the outskirts of Barcelona.

The film begins in 1958 to recall how that illegal settlement was born, and then jumps two decades to the same year of the Constitution, when the immigrant, in addition to speaking Catalan, drives a municipal bus. From that moment on, Barrena plays with the textures of the archive material every time he leaves the neighborhood and enters Barcelona, ​​creating a sentimental postcard from the windows of the bus without too much depth. When it comes to portraying an era of such fervor—in which the home video was something more than a domestic weapon, as demonstrated by the film—the film is a film that is not only a film but also a film that is not a film. Video-New Collectivewhich even put into practice a video-bus that moved through the neighborhoods of Barcelona with the recording equipment and its monitors—, it is missing that the context of 78 is not reduced to the basics: the nostalgic retro backdrop, a few brushstrokes of union and neighborhood struggles and the crutch of “based on…” with final images of the real character.

In The 47the new youth movements could have had a mirror in Vital’s daughter, a key character whose awareness is diluted in a predictable script, condemning the character to an overly schematic role. The father-daughter witness is left in the hands of a unique and moving song — Red rooster, black rooster by Chico Sánchez Ferlosio—which, although it guarantees a lump in the throat, neither resolves nor explains the tension between generations, nor the complex place of those heirs of anti-Francoism.

Yet, The 47 It fulfils its amiable objective, even better than other recent revisions of the Transition. An achievement that is mainly due to the discovery of its central character, with his story as evocative as it is simple, and to its main actor, who plays a Manuel Vital full of nobility and strength. And, of course, to that resounding image of a red bus stubbornly climbing the hill of a poor neighbourhood forgotten by everyone in the midst of democratic euphoria.