Plácido. Film Festival
Madcap, zany, gloriously chaotic and moving at a breathless pace, Plácido must surely rank as one of the great screen comedies. Yet how many of us have even heard of it, let alone seen it? Thanks to the Cambridge Film Festival, we were treated to this extraordinary black-and-white rarity, a film that manages to be both uproariously funny and devastatingly cruel.
Made in 1961, right in the middle of General Franco's repressive dictatorship, Plácido was directed by Luis García Berlanga, with a screenplay co-written by Rafael Azcona, one of Spain's most celebrated screenwriters. Between them they fashioned a bitter satire of bourgeois hypocrisy, Catholic respectability and the great gulf between rich and poor. Quite how they managed to slip so much past the fascist censors is something of a miracle. Perhaps the men with the blue pencils were simply laughing too much to notice what was going on.
Think the Marx Brothers for pace, wisecracking and sheer lunacy. Everybody talks at once, everybody is in a hurry and nobody listens to anybody else. Characters rush in and out of rooms, conversations overlap, small disasters become major catastrophes and the whole thing threatens to collapse into glorious anarchy. But beneath the laughter lurks a very serious message.
The setting is a provincial Spanish town on Christmas Eve, where the great and the good have organised a charitable campaign with the splendidly patronising slogan, "Seat a Poor Person at Your Table." Wealthy families are encouraged to invite a deserving pauper to Christmas dinner, while minor celebrities are brought in to add glamour to the festivities. There are processions, publicity stunts, speeches and endless self-congratulation. Charity has become a spectator sport.
Meanwhile, our central character, Plácido (played with wonderful bewilderment by Cassen), has been hired to drive his little three-wheeled vehicle around town as part of the celebrations. Unfortunately, he has a rather more pressing concern than the happiness of the poor. Unless he can pay the instalment due on his vehicle that very day, he risks losing it altogether. And without his little van, how is he to earn a living?
Nobody seems remotely interested in his predicament. They are all far too busy helping the poor.This is the delicious irony at the heart of the film. Here is a man in genuine financial distress, surrounded by people loudly proclaiming their Christian generosity, yet not one of them has the time or inclination to help him. Instead, he is sent scurrying from one absurd errand to another as the clock ticks relentlessly towards the payment deadline.
And then comes a sequence of quite breathtaking black comedy. One of the unfortunate dinner guests, an elderly unmarried man, is taken seriously ill. His respectable hosts discover, to their horror, that he has been living with a woman outside marriage. Never mind that the poor fellow is dying. What matters is that he should not meet his Maker in a state of sin. A priest must be summoned, a marriage arranged and religious propriety satisfied before the man is allowed to shuffle off this mortal coil.
It is a scene that is simultaneously hilarious, grotesque and deeply disturbing. The man's suffering is almost incidental. What matters to those around him is keeping up appearances. Even death becomes another tiresome administrative inconvenience.
Berlanga directs this mayhem with astonishing skill. His camera takes in crowded rooms and bustling streets where several little dramas are unfolding at once. The dialogue tumbles over itself, the supporting characters are brilliantly drawn and the absurdities multiply with almost mathematical precision. There is scarcely a moment to catch one's breath.
But Azcona and Berlanga are doing far more than making us laugh. Their target is a society in which public morality has become a substitute for private decency, where the wealthy can parade their compassion while remaining utterly indifferent to the real needs of those around them. The Church, the civic authorities and the respectable middle classes all come in for a merciless battering.
One might also wonder how much has changed. The spectacle of well-heeled people congratulating themselves on their charitable good works while ignoring the uncomfortable realities of poverty has a decidedly contemporary ring.
The screening formed part of the festival's tribute to Rafael Azcona, marking the centenary of his birth. His remarkable career stretched across half a century, and Plácido was the first of his feature-film collaborations with Berlanga. As the festival programme so accurately puts it, the humour is "hilarious yet merciless."
That just about sums it up. This is a film in which almost everybody behaves appallingly, almost nobody learns anything and the audience emerges thoroughly entertained, if perhaps a little ashamed of having laughed so much.
What a discovery. What a splendidly wicked Christmas present. And what a reminder that some of the sharpest political criticism can be delivered not through solemn speeches but through the simple, subversive power of laughter.