It has enough charm to get away with this stuff. In the south, they’re addicted to hair gel, in the Basque country they just hack their own barnets… This would be tiresome if the film wasn’t consistently funny, but fortunately it is. Basques eat ridiculous amounts of food, Andalusians love olives, etc etc. They assume that Sevillans are foppish ne’er-do-wells. Rafa assumes that most Basques are terrorists and all are nationalists. ‘It was three weeks before I let have him my number,’ she corrects. ‘You made him wait for three weeks before you got off?’ a stunned Rafa asks Amaia when she’s talking about her ex-fiancé. The Andalusians hug everyone, are super-expressive and sex mad. This is a film that deals freely in crude stereotypes. Once there, he ends up having to impersonate a typical Basque, called Antxon. Lovestruck, he decides to return it in person to her small Basque town. Next morning, she vanishes, leaving her handbag. Their impassioned row leads them to his bedroom, but she crashes out before anything happens. When Rafa (Dani Rovira) one of the waiters in a flamenco bar, starts doing a stand-up routine of (weak) jokes about Basques, she starts heckling. Amaia (Clara Lago) is in Seville enduring a hen weekend even though her wedding has been called off. And if the Catalans – whose flag even uses exactly the same colours as the Spanish one, just with more stripes – gain independence, what of the Basques, who speak an unrelated language so foreign that one of its most used letters, k, barely exists in Spanish? (There is, somewhat inevitably, a ‘k’ joke in this film).Īll that political ferment is the backdrop for this cheery, daft romcom. The Catalans, fuelled by some genuine grievances dating back to Franco’s dictatorship and the usual deluded nationalist toss, are scheming their escape. Within a couple of years, Spain as we know it could have broken into pieces. The tricky nationalism question treated as a frothy romantic farce Director Emilio Martínez Lázaro Stars Clara Lago, Dani Rovira, Karra Elejalde, Carmen Machi Spain 2014 Language Spanish, Basque (with English subtitles) 1hr 38mins Colour
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