Placido

Christmas Eve in a small Spanish town. The well off families organise a campaign: every household will seat a poor person at its table. There is a parade, a beauty queen, photographs. Placido is put to work with his three wheeled motor cart; the instalment on it falls due today and if he does not pay he loses the cart. All day he chases the office where the money must go while at the same time driving in the parade. The poor are distributed to the tables. At one of them things go badly. Luis Garcia Berlanga directs. He wrote the script with Rafael Azcona; their collaboration began here and lasted to the end of Berlanga's career. Casto Sendra Cassen plays Placido. The film was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film. The campaign is called seating a poor person at your table, and the film makes direct fun of the display side of charity. It was shot under Franco and had to deal with the censors; the criticism got through by being buried inside the noise of a farce. The scenes are crowded and the dialogue overlaps; nobody finishes a sentence. The matter it treats is who charity actually serves; the poor are hosted, but nobody asks them what they want. The film takes place in a single day and the pace never drops. The narrative rescues nobody; Placido's own problem is not solved by the end of the day. Its limit is density; the sound is crowded, the characters many, and following it in subtitles is tiring. Who it is for: viewers who like Spanish cinema and black comedy. Who it is not for: it is noisy, crowded, and the ending cold.