Daniel Guzmán (Madrid, 1973) exorcised his adolescence in Aluche in ‘A cambio de nada’, an initiation story starring kids who pilfered at El Corte Inglés, sneaked into nightclubs and tried to be at home as little as possible so as not to see arguing their parents. The actor made use of his 92-year-old grandmother as an actress to jump into directing in that celebrated debut film that overflowed with heart and which won the Goyas for best new director and best new actor for Miguel Herrán. Seven years have passed and Guzmán, who was a renowned graffiti artist and boxer before establishing himself as an actor, returns to the neighborhood with ‘Canallas’, another chronicle of rogues and survivors in our corrupt Spain, although this time from the prism of outrageous humor.
Presented to a competition in Malaga before Universal opens it in theaters on April 1, ‘Canallas’ starts with Julio Iglesias’ ‘Poor Devil’ and closes with ‘Run, run!’ de Leño, quite a declaration of intent. If the soul of ‘A cambio de nada’ was the director’s grandmother, the great asset of his second feature film is Joaquín González, Guzmán’s friend since he was 14 years old and without any previous experience in front of the camera. How to define González, capable of eclipsing Luis Tosar and Guzmán himself as an actor? He says that he is a businessman, and in Malaga he has interrupted interviews because, according to him, his Chinese partner calls his cell phone to discuss a ship loaded with oil docked in Rotterdam. He also tells that he has invested money in the film and that he has sold half a million masks to Ayuso that were left at the airport. In ‘Canallas’ he boasts of business at the highest level, but we soon discover that he is plagued by debts and lives in an apartment in Orcasitas with his mother, a daughter who is a Spanish yo-yo champion, and a brother obsessed with martial arts.
phony and go-getter
Well, it’s all real. At least, González’s apartment and family and we intuit that also the finances of this endearing ghost, who moves in an Opel Corsa from twenty years ago and always apologizes with “I have no cash on me.” His lifelong friends laugh at his airs of an international executive because they know that he lives installed in fantasy. And yet they get into scams with this phony and hustler capable of sabering his mother’s pension.
Guzmán’s merit in ‘Canallas’ is to mix professional actors with people who play themselves, even though the whole story is a fiction that includes Chinese persecutors, dwarves dressed as bullfighters to collect debts, Bulgarian thugs and even Hitler’s teeth . «It is a crazy and special film that seeks popular humor and in which we have tried to avoid parody or commonplaces. It is made to laugh at ourselves, at people who are trying to get ahead and find a life, ”acknowledges the director, who shot more than 250 hours, enough material for five films that later took him a year and a half to edit. Guzmán knows that we all know people like the protagonist. “Everyone tells me. A guy who invents a reality to support his miseries. Joaquín believes that he sells oil and that he is rich. Today he told the producer that he has put 500,000 euros into the film. He is the picaresque of Spain, of people who make their film to endure reality ».
We can laugh at this loser, but the character is not so far from the speculators of the Spain of the big ball. It’s just that it went wrong for him. “We say it since we were kids,” Daniel Guzmán agrees. «You laugh at Joaquín, but one day he does one of his things and leaves. He continues to live with his mother in Orcasitas, but maybe one day he will surprise us in this country where the culture of the big ball grows. ‘Canallas’ plays with that almost documentary air in the portrait of the character, although in the middle of the footage he leaves it a bit aside to focus on the stick that the three friends plot. The portrait of the cheeky man fades and the role becomes more choral, with the poor devils trying to swindle a powerful man in a farce with echoes of ‘Rufufú, ‘Atraco a las tres’ and the first ‘Torrente’.
Guzmán, who has brought his friends from the neighborhood to the premiere in Malaga, acknowledges that his film is social cinema without appearing to be. «It is a stigmatized genre, it seems that you cannot make a popular comedy talking about the social. The English and the French do it, the social is not only drama and sadness. In the neighborhood there is comedy, pride and desire to get ahead. My friends are taxi drivers, plumbers, electricians… And from the moment they get up until they go to bed they are laughing. They put me in my place, they anchor me to the ground, without them I would be nothing. And what do your friends from Spanish cinema tell you? «Ha, ha, I have to take them myself. Two of them call me ‘subsidized’. Do you know what happens?, I tell them. That of the 3 million that this movie costs, the ICAA has only provided 30%, the rest must be achieved. Since they have been bombarded that Spanish cinema is bad and is subsidized, they believe it ».
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