Mondays in the Sun
Director Fernando Leon de Aranoa's ''Mondays in the Sun'' shows a Spain nobody sees much anymore. The country seems poor, the people in this coastal region seem without hope, and the band of unemployed men at the movie's center struggle to believe in themselves. Since their shipyard was shut down and they were laid off, a few of them have found other work, but most haven't.
In their interactions with one another and the rest of the world, there's a resigned disappointment that hums and blinks like the damaged light fixtures that show up throughout. But de Aranoa is neither a pessimist nor a tragedian. He's a gentle, realist social worker, and the well-acted movie he's made to showcase his humanism is incredibly moving. He doesn't use his characters as political symbols; they're everyday people whose circumstances are vastly resonant.
Santa (Javier Bardem), Jose (Luis Tosar), and Lino (Jose Angel Egido) were among the 200 men locked out and let go by a shipyard. Protests resulted in a violent confrontation, which we see in the film's opening title sequence. Days are now spent in dejected repose; evenings are at the bar. Over endless drinks, the men argue about the general headache of working for a profit-mad company that sees its laborers as expendable. ''Cheers'' it's not.
But it's these gentlemen's domestic lives that give an intimate sense of what they're emotionally and mentally up against. Lino has a pleasant middle-class home, a wife, a son, and an aching sense of insecurity. He suspects he's too old to get work in a job market that values youth. Egido might say all of 10 words in the film, but his face bespeaks the kind of demoralization you just don't talk about.
Jose, scruffy and serious, stays at home, while his wife, Ana, (Nieve de Medina, in a beautifully steely performance) works unpredictable shifts at a cannery job that leaves her underpaid, sore, and reeking of fish. She resents being the sole breadwinner, and you feel that Jose hates it just as much but lacks the will to correct it.
Bardem's testy and brutish Santa has no apparent family. His comrades seem to be his blood. And the women come and go. We even see him pick up the pretty sample lady (Laura Dominguez) at the supermarket.
Santa obviously misses working, though. When he finds a drill and picks it up, his longing to be doing something with it is almost heartbreaking. While Santa seems to have no inner life to speak of, the role seems to have been written for a big actor to inflate the character and stick his heart on his sleeve. This is one of those parts that Anthony Quinn was born to play, and Bardem does a handsome, uncanny job of channeling Quinn's blocky physique and almost poetic seething.
''Mondays in the Sun'' is a long way from conventional Spanish portraits of masculinity and closer to the work of British director Ken Loach (''Riff Raff,'' ''The Navigators'') and that of the French workplace dramatist Laurent Cantet (''Human Resources,'' ''Time Out''). De Aranoa appears to have a warmer touch, and unlike Loach, who telegraphs disaster to hammer a political point, de Aranoa doesn't believe in martyrs.
Sure, he makes a working metaphor of the old ant-and-grasshopper story, but the film's images are what echo the loudest. A scene of the men watching TV at the bar comes to mind. That girl onscreen in the bikini seems a zillion miles from there.
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