"You fancy?"
It is the expression that the Spanish use to
give form to desire
.
It refers to both the table and free time and any other issue that requires defining where the desire goes.
This morning I used it naturally and, for the first time, almost four years after our life here, I felt that Madrid is beginning to be not only a space but a “place” (the distinction is from the humanist geographer of Chinese origin Yi-Fu Tuan) , which
imprints on people the personality and mood of an entire landscape.
Taken to the extreme, the question of what is desirable (the things, emotions and experiences that we feel essential or desirable and distinguish from that which is dispensable) is what induces Morán, the protagonist of
Los criminales
, by
Rodrigo Moreno
, to steal .
The Argentine filmmaker has just been honored at Casa de América, which has dedicated five days to showing his films in Madrid, including this story that represented Argentina at the Oscars.
Morán decides to take from the bank where he works the money equivalent to the salary of the remaining years before he and Román, an office colleague, whom he turns into an accomplice, retire.
He will face the consequences of the crime without complaining because
for him not having to spend a quarter of a century signing is worth the three and a half years in prison that he gets after turning himself in
and confessing (while the money is guarded by Román, whom no one suspects).
He buys time of life at the price of shame and imprisonment.
The film crosses different genres (comedy, police...) and
displays its utopia with art, humor and intelligence.
One of the activities that Morán carries out behind bars is reading poetry and among the texts he discovers is “La Gran Salina”, by Ricardo Zelarayán (1922-2010), from Entre Ríos, a marginal and very free author, who became a myth for the generation of the 90s. In that poem (extensive as the character's confinement), a train trip through the Salinas Grandes (place, not space) becomes an
obsessive rumor that frames memories, occurrences and interpretations.
The spectator in me celebrates Morán's plan that offers three hours of great cinema.
The reader knows, on the other hand, that literature offers that inner freedom anywhere and that
the banker could have avoided prison (never desirable) if he had started reading poetry during his office years.