Outlaws

Girona, 1978. Nacho is a schoolboy with a stammer and glasses whom nobody invites to their table. One summer at an arcade he meets Zarco and Tere. Both come from the shacks at the edge of the city; they steal, they take cars, and Nacho chooses to stay with them. What follows is fast: within months there is armed robbery, then police, then prison. The film is not interested in crime but in how the class line gets drawn. Nacho can go home whenever he wants and the other two have no home to go to, and when the story jumps forward years it is plain who paid. Zarco's later transformation into a legend is another of its concerns. Daniel Monzon directed, from Javier Cercas's novel. The period work is the strongest thing in it: Spain at the end of the seventies, the outskirts during the transition, and the atmosphere of the quinqui films that genuinely existed in those years, all reconstructed exactly. Who it is for: anyone who likes Spanish crime cinema and stories about the young. Who it is not for: anyone wanting restraint. The film stylises its violence, Tere's story is squeezed between two men, and the last section explains too much.