Placido / Plácido (1961)

×

Placido / Plácido (1961)

Close

This is an effective satire directed by Luis Berlanga that pans charity from the head – the cold, calculated or unthinking kind – as versus charity from the heart. The focus is on Placido (Casto Sendra-Cassen), a truckdriver who has little money and so making regular payments on his truck can be difficult, so much so that he gets behind and is in danger of having his vehicle repossessed. Meanwhile, he gets involved in a local, annual charity drive that opens up his eyes to the problems and foibles of other impoverished people. After those experiences, Placido has a different attitude toward his monthly payments.

Berlanga's first collaboration with scriptwriter Rafael Azcona*, Plácido is a jet-black comedy that was originally entitled Seat a Poor Person at Your Dinner Table before the film ran afoul of the censors. Plácido González, played by the great Catalan comedian Cassen, uses his tricycle to deliver fruit baskets for a local charity while trying to figure out how he can come up with the money he owes before his tricycle gets repossessed. A bevy of local society women decides to take in beggars and other unfortunates, although they soon discover more about the objects of their charity than they'd rather know. Berlanga takes aim at the false piety on display, as acts of generosity are revealed to be little more than events on a social calendar. There are many hilarious situations and unexpected reversals, yet all the laughter can't cover up the strong sense of outrage that courses through the film.

At the end of the 1950s Berlanga met the man who would become (and remains) the doyen of Spanish screenwriters, Rafael Azcona. A hitherto impecunious novelist and hack writer at the humourist weekly magazine La Codorniz, Azcona had begun his film career, adapting his own novels, for the Italian director Marco Ferreri. The encounter with Berlanga was to prove fortuitous and the two men would work together for the following 35 years. Berlanga's masterpieces Plácido (1961) and El verdugo (The Executioner, 1963) were among their first collaborations. Both films portrayed a Spain undergoing the transition to economic modernity. Likewise, they combine Berlanga's sense of carnival with Azcona's savagely black humour. From Plácido onwards the work of Berlanga would be marked by its chaotic depiction of the unpredictable crowd and by his major contribution to cinematic technique, his particular use of the long take or sequence shot.

Berlanga's use of the sequence shot is central to a much remarked upon feature of his cinema: its choral quality. Berlanga's cinematic composition (and his comedy) emerges out of the representation of the crisis of an individual (who is usually male) in the conflictual context of the multitudinous group. Furthermore, his faithfulness to the same group of repertory actors (a generation trained in theatre and very often in music hall) that, with few exceptions, has remained with him for the last 40 years, gives a particularly 'spontaneous' feel to his cinema. This team, together with Berlanga's idiosyncratic camera work, has enabled the director to portray the 'popular' while retaining his own very personal style. In this way, just as he has violated critical categories of popular film, he has also complicated established approaches to auteur cinema.

Nominated for the Best Foreign Language film award at that year's Oscars, Plácido—a Christmas movie—has a direct relationship with the work of Frank Capra and in particular It's a Wonderful Life (1946), albeit with none of Capra's sentimentality. …Plácido unmasked the dominant discourses surrounding the traditional family and Christian charity…

×

Placido / Plácido (1961)

Close