Christmas is a time of charity, and that’s a wonderful thing. But too often that charity comes in bad faith or is administered for the wrong reasons. Because being charitable makes you look good, it doesn’t necessarily have to be altruistic. Charity can be as much about making yourself feel better as making life easier for the less fortunate. Especially for certain rich types who probably have it within their power to do more than they choose to.
Luis García Berlanga’s 1961 comedy Plácido satirizes this impulse of the wealthy to use charity as self-fulfilment in an extremely pointed and effective way. It’s set in a nameless city in Spain where a Christmas campaign has been organized by the local elite to “feed a poor man at your table” -to host an impoverished or homeless person for Christmas dinner. So proud are the organizers of this initiative that they’ve commercialized it: they’ve sought a sponsorship by a cookware company and successfully attracted a host of famous actors to come to the city and endorse it. All the while, they could care less about the actual people that they are ostensibly helping.
In the midst of it, one such poor man, Plácido (“Cassen” Casto Senda), whose own family seems to live out of a disused public bathroom, has been hired by the campaigns’ chief organizer Gabino Quintanilla (José Luis López Vázquez) for a series of tasks including promotion through a rented Christmas-themed motorcycle car -which keeps him from paying the notary for the car, a payment that is due by the end of Christmas Eve. Adding to the anxiety and frustration is the various bureaucracy he has to go through to make the payment, additional fees that hadn’t been tallied, and misunderstandings with Quintanilla, himself overwhelmed with the days’ events.
And there is a lot that happens in this ninety minute movie that goes from a parade (in which some of the poor men made to participate suffer illness as a result of the cold) to an actors’ auction where hardly any of the city’s impoverished make an appearance, to the various households playing host to these people -exhibiting general niceties as they feed him but at best feigning interest in their lives and struggles. Berlanga doesn’t waste a moment as the film moves at a pretty consistent harried pace, with constant dialogue and interactions that run into each other. But it flows rather well and efficiently, aided perhaps by a lot of long takes that keep the action in motion. There is a tangible sense of chaos to some of the proceedings, but it is never unclear where the focus is and what’s being said.
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Berlanga has a lot of scorn for the rich and for vapid celebrities, although he uses both to fun ends through sharp caricatures and laudable buffoonery. This treatment almost mirrors that of his fellow Spanish social critic filmmaker Luis Buñuel (this was only a year before The Exterminating Angel), though Berlanga wants to keep a degree realism for the purposes of his comment. Still, it allows for great farcical scenes, such as an official desperately trying to placate his inebriated guest, and most intensely a gaggle of housewives far more concerned about an elderly indigent “living in sin” with his partner than the fact he is currently dying of severe angina (implicitly due to malpractice by an orthodontist) -much of the last act sees them trying to marry the pair before he passes away, in one of the darker chapters of the film. Even after he passes, the party guests aren’t so much sorry for his loss as worried about the optics of such a thing happening -the same reason they’re afraid to turn any of these impoverished folk out of doors, which many of them clearly want to. It’s not kept secret the fact these folks are disgusted by those living in poverty. One woman privately reveals how frightening it is to imagine herself in their situation, and Quintanilla sees Plácido as an irritating burden he’s saddled with.
The ridiculousness of all the pomp and celebration is not lost on the folks the campaign is meant to help and on whom Berlanga has the utmost sympathy. They look on the enterprise with cynicism and those who do volunteer express routinely through all the hullabaloo that they just want a decent meal. The saddest thing in the movie is when the widow of the dead man, only just married before he passed, is left by herself with her grief. It’s a bleak, lonely image to contrast the warm Christmas imagery throughout. Christmas is a time for charity, but honesty and earnestness must go with it. Otherwise it becomes about the giver and not the receiver.
Do I really need to explain why? Criterion just brought Citizen Kane into the collection for the first time, so why not do the same with another universally beloved classic? Who doesn’t love It’s a Wonderful Life? Jimmy Stewart? Donna Reed? George Bailey finding the will to live again and that mean Mr. Potter? That quaint old Bedford Falls and lovely, spooky house? The charming 1940s references and Uncle Billy’s Irish singing? It’s great! Frank Capra’s only got one movie in the collection and frankly It Happened One Night is not his best! It’s good for sure, but there are others that ought to be so celebrated. Even Frank Borzage has two! Ernst Lubitsch has five! So come on, Criterion. Toss old Capra a bone! It’s Christmas!
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