Mario Casas and Alberto San Juan serve ‘The Dinner’ to Franco

April 1939. Madrid It still smells of gunpowder, fear and pain. The Civil war It ended just two weeks ago, but it doesn’t matter. TO Franco his stomach growls. He is hungry for celebration. And nothing seems more urgent. Nor more dangerous.

At least, not for the maître d’ Genaro (Alberto San Juan) and Lieutenant Santiago Medina (Mario Casas), in charge of preparing the perfect banquet in record time. No margin of error.

The menu? Risky. In the fiction, “eggs a la Aurora”, “soup at a quarter of an hour” and “beef garnished with potatoes and wine” are served, as they remember. Alberto San Juan, Mario Casas y Manuel Gomez Pereira in RNE morningscon Juan Ramon Lucas y Mamen Asencio. There may have been more dishes, but memory is fragile and the preparations—in the kitchen and filming—are shared among the entire crew. staff.

And in the Study 101 of the Radio House several of those members are missing —Asier Etxeandia, Nora Fernandez, Antonio Resines, Elvira Minguez, Eva Ugarte, Oscar Lasarteo Carmen Balague—. Same as in Hotel Palace of the plot, converted into a hospital, there is not a single cook available. The best are republicans imprisonedabout to be executed. But “the dictators “They are very capricious and when they decide something and want it, everyone falls at their feet.”

In reality, Dinner (The escape is served) —Gómez Pereira’s new film, participated by RTVE and with premiere the October 17— offers a different menu, but also strong: a acid comedycooked over low heat.

“We start from the play The generals’ dinnerof José Luis Alonso de Santos, what happened to me Sancho Grace in 2008“says its director.

The recipe was already good then. “I received the script four years ago and I wanted to participate. I loved it. It was very intelligent, it was very well written and I fell in love,” confesses Mario Casas. Gómez Pereira only had to adjust it “not enslaving itself to the story, but maintaining its spirit” to make it a star.

And that, sometimes, means adding new ingredients. For example, “the death and the fear“. “We needed them to be present because they don’t end up in the postwar period. They follow the executions. Therefore, we put characters in the film that were not in the play, such as the officer Alonso (Asier Etxeandia)”, he explains. Other times, it involves trying mixtures.

“Alberto and I had not worked together. We grew and built that relationship between two characters who seem different, but are not so different,” says Casas. Without going any further, “no one is doing what they really want, even if they are efficient at it,” adds the director.

On other occasions, however, the recipe requires omitting some elements. “There are also things that we have discarded,” Gómez Pereira acknowledges.

But nothing happens. The result works. The combination of removing, adding and mixing has been ideal. “This movie is very choral. Perhaps the relationship between Genaro and Medina is the main axis, but there are many derivatives,” highlights San Juan.

Fellowship is one of them. “This film is the story of a amistad and how life puts two people who, in principle, have nothing to do with each other, in a common and problematic circumstance from which a friendship arises. It is a journey of the protagonists towards themselves through their encounter.”