The actor and director competes in Malaga with a comedy starring a childhood friend, a mischievous hustler who plays himself
Daniel Guzmán (Madrid, 1973) exorcised his adolescence in Aluche in ‘In exchange for nothing’, 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 anyone argue their parents. The actor made use of his 92-year-old grandmother as an actress to jump into the direction of that celebrated debut film that overflowed with heart and that won the Goyas for best new direction and best revelation 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 wild humor.
Presented in competition in Malaga before Universal releases it in theaters on April 1, ‘Canallas’ starts with ‘Pobre diablo’ by Julio Iglesias and closes with ‘¡Corre, corre!’ de Leño, a complete declaration of intentions. If the soul of ‘In exchange for nothing’ 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 with no previous experience in front of the camera. How to define González, capable of outshining Luis Tosar and Guzmán himself as an actor? He says he is a businessman, and in Malaga he has interrupted interviews because, according to him, his Chinese partner calls him on his cell phone to talk about a ship loaded with oil docked in Rotterdam. He also says 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 debt and lives in an apartment in Orcasitas with his mother, a Spanish yo-yo champion daughter and a brother obsessed with martial arts.
Faker and hustler
Well, it’s all real. At least, the apartment and the family of González and we intuit that also the finances of this endearing ghost, who moves around in an Opel Corsa from twenty years ago and always apologizes with “I don’t have cash on me”. His lifelong friends laugh at the airs of an international executive because they know that he lives installed in fantasy. And yet they get into shenanigans with this fraud and hustler who is able to sell his mother his pension.
Guzmán’s merit in ‘Canallas’ is mixing professional actors with people who play themselves, although the whole story is a fiction that includes Chinese persecutors, dwarfs 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 try to get ahead and make a living, “acknowledges the director, who shot more than 250 hours, enough material for five films that later took 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 edit their film to endure reality ».
Joaquín González, Daniel Guzmán and Luis Tosar in ‘Canallas’.
We can laugh at this loser, but the character is not so far from the speculators of the Spain of the pitch. Only it has gone bad for him. “We say it since we were kids,” agrees Daniel Guzmán. «You laugh at Joaquín, but one day he does one of his own and leaves. He continues to live with his mother in Orcasitas, but maybe one day he will give a surprise in this country where the ball culture is magnified ». ‘Canallas’ plays with that almost documentary air in the character’s portrait, although in the middle of the film he leaves it aside a bit to focus on the plot that the three friends are up to. The cheeky portrait is diluted and the leading role becomes more choral, with the poor devils trying to rip off 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. Two of them call me ‘subsidized’. Do you know what’s going on? I tell them. That of the 3 million that this film costs, the ICAA has only put 30%, the rest must be achieved. As they have been bombarded that Spanish cinema is bad and is subsidized, they believe it».
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