‘The Dinner’, the film in which communist prisoners are forced to feed Franco: “Humor and comedy are weapons of defense and attack”

Just two weeks after finishing the Civil wara banquet was organized for Francisco Franco at the Palace Hotel to celebrate the victory with his generals.

In 1998 the playwright’s play was published José Luis Alonso de Santos that addressed that issue. It was titled The generals’ dinner and, in it, the protagonists were Lieutenant Medina, responsible for coordinating the event, and maître Genaro, who will tell you that all the restaurant’s cooks were in prison for being communists.

This is the starting point of Dinnerin which the director Manuel Gomez Pereira returns to the field he knows best, that of ensemble comedy, which made him one of the highest-grossing filmmakers in our country thanks to films like Love seriously harms health.

“I have always liked satires on dictators. They have always been done, since The great dictatorde Chaplin, a Damn bastards, by Tarantino, or To be or not to beby Ernst Lubitsch. But the difficult thing is finding the right tone. In comedy you have to be rigorous, especially if you move in quicksand so as not to hurt sensitivities. And well, I also think that you have to take sides. Humor and comedy are weapons of defense and attack,” Manuel Gómez Pereira tells Infobae Spain.

Thus, the director will transfer us to the Palace Hotel in Madrid, converted into a hospital after the war. “I wanted the Palace Hotel to be a parable of our country at that time when all ideologies were concentrated.” There, a group of characters will be forced to prepare a banquet for the dictator and his entourage in record time, despite the scarcity of resources and the constant threat of repression.

In that context, Mario Casas plays national lieutenant Santiago Medina, while Alberto San Juan plays maître Genaro. The cast is completed with names like Asier Etxeandiain the skin a fascist general, Elvira MinguezCarmen Balagué, Oscar Lasarte and the participation almost as a ‘cameo’ of Antonio Resines,

The plot is articulated around the tension between the urgency of satisfying the dictator’s whims and the survival of the cooks, all of them republicans imprisoned and threatened with execution.

The fictitious banquet menu, composed of “eggs a la Aurora”, “quarter-hour soup” and “veal with a side of potatoes and wine”, reflects both the forced sophistication of the occasion and the precariousness of the available resources. The film, however, goes beyond the culinary anecdote and delves into the moral complexity of its protagonists.

The relationship between Genaro and Medina constitutes the central axis of the narrative, but the film is defined by its choral character and by the multiplicity of personal stories that converge in the hotel. Humor, far from trivializing the context, becomes a tool to address historical memory and moral reflection.

The presence of Franco in the film, played by French Xavieris reserved for the last third of the footage, following a narrative strategy that Gómez Pereira already used in Love seriously harms health (1996) with the figure of King Juan Carlos. The director explains that, unlike other cinemas, in Spain there persists a certain self-censorship at the time of satirize historical figures like Franco, while other countries do not have that fear. “We are in a very modest moment, where political correctness triumphs, where everything scares us.”

The script, signed by Joaquín Oristrell together with Gómez Pereira and Yolanda García Serranois committed to a comedy of “lights and shadows”, where the characters try to recover in a single day what they lost during the three years of war. The process of creating the characters and their relationships has been, according to the filmmaker, especially enriching, and the film is presented as a work in which each character has their own story.

The satire of Dinner is part of a tradition that, although scarce in Spanish cinema, has precedents such as The heifer by Luis García Berlanga (1985) or the most recent Malnazidos (2020), but which has rarely directly addressed the figure of Franco.

The playwright Albert Boadellawhich premiered in 2003 Have a good trip, Excellency!con Ramon Fontserè in the role of the dictator, he recognized at the time that humor about Franco was our unfinished business as a country and that comedy can function as a form of collective therapy to process the traumas of the past.

Manuel Gómez Pereira believes that it is a good time to release this film that talks about the sides, when precisely now we are ‘ideologically’ polarized. “It’s curious that he was able to make the film when the dictators have returned disguised as populists. And they do it to attract fansto manipulate. And then there are very young people who believe these hoaxes and think that with Franco people lived better. They don’t stop to think about the consequences of war, how devastating it is. I think it is important that this be captured in cinema, without appearing didactic, but the return to the imagery of fascism is dangerous. You find that, with everything we have advanced, everything can be destroyed with a stroke of a pen.”