Alex de la Iglesia
Álex de la Iglesia portrays a deranged Spain in a road movie that reveals itself as a romantic comedy and is based on the charisma of Alberto San Juan and Ernesto Alterio
The frenetic work pace of Álex de la Iglesia, who has always confessed to being happy filming, leads to the release of ‘The Fourth Passenger’ in theaters this October 28, just six months after ‘Veneciafrenia’ did. Meanwhile, the director from Bilbao has had time to shoot the second season of the series ’30 Coins’ and to produce a few films framed in a fantastic genre that the author of ‘The Day of the Beast’ turned upside down in our country. ‘The fourth passenger’ is better, much better than the failed ‘Veneciafrenia’ and is part of his filmography in the section of commissioned comedies, to which his most complete work of recent years belongs: ‘Perfect strangers’.
De la Iglesia accepted the challenge from Paolo Vasile, the boss of Telecinco Cinema, who encouraged him to shoot a romantic comedy. For the director of ‘Sad Trumpet Ballad’, romanticism cannot be something mellifluous and light, so this love story that lasts as long as it has to last in these times of long films -1 hour and forty minutes- also has space for intrigue, action, comedy, terror and social criticism, courtesy of the script written by four hands with his usual accomplice, Jorge Guerricaechevarría. A trip from Bilbao to Madrid in a shared car sustains a film with no pretensions other than to entertain -which is no small thing- and that benefits above all from two actors who have landed in their fifties in a state of grace: Alberto San Juan and Ernesto Alterio .
This road movie that starts at the Arenal Bridge, reserves a space for the architecture of Frank Gehry in La Rioja and has its climax in a monumental traffic jam at the gates of Madrid, presents the troubled executive incarnated as the driver of a brand new Volvo XC 60 by Alberto San Juan, a poor man who has just been divorced, a control freak, who sucks up to the young woman twenty years his junior whom he has already taken to the capital (Blanca Suárez) on several occasions through an app ( the film’s previous title was ‘BlaBlaCar’). This is going to be the trip in which he declares his love for her, but he did not count on the other two passengers: an unbearable, smug cretin who embroiders a hilarious Ernesto Alterio and a handsome bohemian one of those who go through life with a guitar (Rubén Cortada ).
Jaime Ordóñez, Alberto San Juan, Rubén Cortada and Blanca Suárez in ‘The fourth passenger’.
Each of the four characters discover their miseries along the journey. It is very difficult to feel empathy for these cartoonish beings, although the charisma of Alterio and San Juan raise the interest when they are on stage. As usual in Álex de la Iglesia’s cinema, the comic gradually gives way to intrigue and the macabre. His fondness for supporting characters in charge of wonderful actors reserves a place for a mysterious man who follows the protagonists (Carlos Areces) and a leathery Civil Guard sergeant who always appears at the most inopportune moment (Jaime Ordóñez, always impeccable ). Fights, chases, a shipment of hashish and even an evil wink against cinephilia and ‘Last Year in Marienbad’ have a place in the film.
‘The fourth passenger’ takes place in a deranged, violent and polarized country, always aware of the selfie and social networks, glued to the earpiece of the mobile. Love and calm don’t seem to have a place in this kind of ‘Cars locos’ on the A-1, which makes us even like a rude and hustler, a quinqui ‘coach’, always waiting for the next hit. A trademark of the house, physical action replaces dialogue in the ending of a film that uses the road as a metaphor for life. The title in Spanish of another hilarious road movie by John Hughes from 1987 with Steve Martin and John Candy already said it, ‘Planes, trains and automobiles’, which among us was called ‘Better alone than in bad company’.
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