August 14-20, 2003

movies

Nothing Doing

BASK NATIONALISTS: Santa (Javier Bardem, right) and Lino (José Ángel Egido) catch some rays.

Mondays in the Sun is a tender tale of camaraderie in the face of apathy.

by Sam Adams

Santa (Javier Bardem) is a bear of a man, but a declawed bear. Out of work and nearly hope, he spends his days at a bar owned by a former co-worker of his at the local shipyard, one who was smart (or opportunistic) enough to take the buyout and not contest the layoffs, and who opened the bar with the money he saved. Santa, by contrast, fought back, and so in addition to everything else finds himself saddled with a bill for an expensive streetlight outside the warehouse, which he smashed in the heat of a fervent demonstration.

It's never hard to see such passions beneath the surface of Bardem's characters, of course, as bound by inertia as they might be. Even heavier here than in The Dancer Upstairs, Bardem doesn't suggest laziness or inaction so much as a man whose boundaries have folded in on themselves, whose considerable energies are pent up, his body swollen in an effort to contain them.

Fernando León de Aranoa's film is sufficiently collective-oriented that Santa (whose real name is Carlos Santamaria) is only one among many characters, from the elderly Amador (Celso Bugallo), who holds down a corner of the bar and is barely intelligible when he does speak, to Serguei (Serge Riaboukine), an ex-cosmonaut trainee who never made it to the stars. Deflating any suspicions that the film might be a left-wing tract, Serguei tells a rueful story about the collapse of communism, which climaxes with a mea culpa by a party official: "Everything they said about communism was true. Unfortunately, everything we said about capitalism was also true."

Inasmuch as it's about men whose lives are characterized by inaction, Mondays in the Sun is episodic, inconclusive: Lino (José Ángel Egido) keeps going for job interviews, ever less sanguine about his prospects, eventually humiliating himself in an attempt to look younger and more desirable to a prospective employer. Santa's fuse keeps sputtering but never quite ignites, and the northern Spanish sun keeps beating down on them.

Like Last Orders and Riff-Raff, Mondays in the Sun takes pleasure in working-class male camaraderie while acknowledging that it can be a trap, leaving men without the tools to confront or even acknowledge their own limitations. In that sense, it's a tragedy, but it's also a tribute to their stoicism and determination. Given that framework, it's not surprising that few women make significant appearances in the story, though Lino's wife, Ana (Nieve de Medina), proves herself the men's equal in tenacity, and surpasses them in understanding.

Watching Mondays in the Sun, you can't help but think how impossible it would be to conceive an American equivalent: not because similar situations don't occur here, but because the American filmmaking industry regards working people with such a virulent mixture of contempt and disinterest that a movie that doesn't either ignore them or ennoble them into unrecognizability is almost inconceivable. (Even the otherwise fine American Splendor discards its source material's emphasis on the minutiae of a 9-to-5.) Some things can be translated by subtitles, and some remain inexplicable.

Mondays in the Sun

Written and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa A Lions Gate Films release Opens Friday at Ritz East

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