Barecelona is a city with many inhabitants, extends to left and right between two rivers (the river Besos and Llobregat north to south) limited the sea on the east and the west Collserola .. . In this space, crossed by plains, low hills, ancient streams, villages near the walled city have been gradually swallowed by the metropolis, the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu tells a story.
A servant, who lives in this city for 46 years and kicking every day the streets, smell her perfume and suffers the consequences, saw the story and found it tremendously. A Tale of probable and possible beings inhabiting the Mediterranean area.
Uxbal is a father struggling to raise her two children, with the added problem of his wife bipolar, you have to stand up to a serious problem health that may determine the future of their children.
is an ordinary man has no history that anyone will remember, does not stand out at all, is ... someone who takes life where it leads. It may seem a tough guy, and he certainly is, but it is a gift: he has not lost the ability to love, or their children or others. In its own way and within the ruthless, corrupt, that the law has established immigrants who land in the city, tries to maintain an "in-kind of" justice. This justice is hard to understand, both for immigrants to whom they give work to the police friend or even brother, business partner unorthodox. First
Uxbal is a deeply lonely man, who has no dip. The circumstances are making their heavier and heavier burden: children to be educated, couple that can barely tell and neither can take care of itself his ailing health ... and the few gestures of kindness toward others trying to turn against him. Fight like a samurai, and know you have to lose ...
I will not give details of the argument, if you have not seen, because I went to see it with certain prejudices and the reality of the film passed me.
not pretty attend the reality of immigration are most disadvantaged in Barcelona, \u200b\u200bpeople who make their living in illegal, if not total outside the law. These paraditas of blanket tops we sell pirated CDs, imitation Tous handbags at great prices, enclose another reality that we all refused to recognize. We care a damn if that man of color depends on the murky business, which in turn is unfair competition for that another shopkeeper who opens his shop every morning and pay high taxes for it. Buy cheap, and that purchase, full of double standards, annoying the shopkeeper, can survive without papers can not do much more and get rich with an intermediary or a corrupt cop who is left to do, in exchange for a percentage. Is a zero sum game: everyone wins.
Does everyone win? Nobody stops to think about the consequences of what you buy someone in these conditions? I think to pretend everything ingorancia disturbed and upset. Not this complicated. Someone told me long ago not think it hurts to see things as they are, too. So we anesthetize the silliest rationales for not recognizing as what, to not address under what situations.
not much talk about these issues. Raids are made regularly in certain parts of my city "for cleaning" of immigrants and illegal sales, dismantling some sweatshop where people without documents are forced to work in conditions that no union would approve (and our beloved and reviled Constitution). We took the illegal vendors on one side and get into another so that not "see much." Sometimes we escape the mossos . Last summer witnessed a threat of flight, boarded the bus in which I was returning home from the hospital. I realized that people helped camouflage, to go unnoticed. I felt sorry. They do not want them here, but we buy their goods cheaper, we pay taxes but no jobs for unskilled labor so qualified. So give with one hand and removed with the other.
On more than one occasion I am ashamed. Own and others' shame.
And this is what you get, and one of the things that has this movie. All The story takes place in the city of Barcelona, \u200b\u200bin a location near my house I know. I have the honor of attending the Hospital del Mar to people who, as Uxbal, you have to deal with complicated situations and do so with a dignity so simple and natural. The beaches of Barceloneta, a school of the Raval, Gothic Quarter streets, even some location in the mine, appear alongside the Barcelona skyline, to make credible the story of Uxbal.
other hand, there are moments of brutal tenderness in the film, which shows the blurred image Uxbal own thinking. Those moments are especially exciting for me, walk in the same places the protagonist. View dawn near the sea, in the short streets of Barceloneta, is a small privilege in which only some children's souls and unconscious, repair ... look at the sky and see flocks of birds fluttering, sniffing the morning air in the neighborhoods of Barcelona who play the sea, watching the crazy town wakes up every day and goes to sleep every night ... I am not all that strange. Nor is foreign to me the vague feeling that I get the main character in this story: he tired of life, and at the same time, want to live hard.
I am told that reading stories is something you just bored, or simply interested to hear on people's lives, real or fictional. I still interested in the stories that some are determined to have, whether in the light of the moon, one night in the forest or on a desktop or hand of confidence, like a fable, concentrated in a good book or engaging film.
The stories are ... reflections and pieces of ourselves and others, through them pretend to live a life that is not ours and they, in turn, feed on our ghosts. The storyteller has something magical hands and the words that weaves its narratives. Now, with the film, too, are images.
Only a more detailed comment: the title of the film, which arises from a question Uxbal's daughter, while he does his homework. Things, then, should be such as they sound right?
