Battle on hedgehogs – Newspaper Kommersant No. 2 (7447) dated 01/10/2023

The eccentric Spanish melodrama of Joaquin Mason “Battle of the Chiefs” (La vida padre) is released. More precisely, not Spanish, but Basque, which explains a lot in the plot. I tried to figure out the technology of making traditional Basque soup from sea urchins and the intricacies of political passions that have always torn apart the Spanish provinces. Mikhail Trofimenkov.

Spanish cinema, from Pedro Almodóvar to the latest filmmaker, is a genre in its own right. So the “Battle of the Chiefs” is bursting with an abundance of gags. From a spontaneous psychedelic party in a psychiatric hospital, the doctors and nurses of which the hero Mikel (Enric Oker) flavored the cakes with some kind of delicate substance. Before the problem of Mikel’s family resemblance to his father Juan (Carra Elejalde), emerging from an absence of thirty years, during which everyone considered him drowned in the river.

Seeing them together, all the characters of the “Battle” are immediately touched: “How similar you are, well, just one face!” The problem is that it is difficult to pick up defendants who are less similar to each other.

Mikel is a thin hidalgo with a thin brush mustache. Juan evokes associations with ancient Greek freaks and gouges like Aesop, Socrates or Diogenes. A matted beard, horns of hair framing a bald head, periodic fits of sacred madness. A homeless person is a homeless person, but when he starts, once again escaping from the hospital, to rock out at a disco, fashionable youth make way for him in a fit of equally sacred horror.

In general, the joke about their family resemblance is straightforward and stupid, but, surprisingly, when it is repeated from the screen for the tenth time, it starts to work, really make you laugh.

And somehow miraculously combined with completely Indian melodramatic passions. Like: “Dad, dad, you didn’t recognize me, I’m your son Mikel!” Hugs, tears, snot. And then Juan again switches all this snotty splendor into burlesque mode, stubbornly calling Mikel not a son, but a pig.

And sea urchins and toads are to blame for everything. The fact is that Juan, before his disappearance, was the legendary chef of the Gates restaurant in Bilbao, in the Basque Country. So legendary that King Juan Carlos himself soaped himself to taste his sea urchins in the immemorial year of 1990.

A secular triumph turned into a disaster. Mikel and his brother, the hoarder, stuffed fresh toads into the plates of the crowned ladies and other clean people. Those, as if they were trained specifically for such a solemn moment, synchronously jumped out of the soup. Horror, horror, horror, the end of Juan’s career and a fatal fall from the bridge for 30 years.

After a measured period, the audience meets Mikel himself as the chef of the Gates, claiming the third Michelin star in the ranking of world restaurants. Yes, and the king, forgetting the former affront, was again going to visit Bilbao incognito.

Only here is the rub. And anonymous – allegedly anonymous, everyone knows perfectly well who he is – a Michelin inspector, and Juan Carlos dream of the notorious hedgehogs. One tried them in childhood, the other, almost choking on a toad, never tasted them. But the magic recipe has been lost, and in the Gates they are fed some kind of hipster minimalist Japanese stuff. Only the insane Juan can save the situation, for 30 years of wandering he has enriched himself not only with culinary, but also quite narcotic experience. It doesn’t matter where exactly he spent these years: let’s say, in Shambhala.

The problems with the gala dinner, however, are not limited to the search for a mystical recipe. Juan, to put it mildly, is disgusted by the very thought of the presence of the Spanish monarch in his institution. This subtext is obvious to the Spanish, but not to the domestic audience.

The fact is that the Basques are traditionally at enmity with the Castilians and Catalans. In several civil wars that tore apart Spain in the 19th century, the Basques fought for the Carlists, supporters of the alternative claimant to the throne, Don Carlos. That branch of the Bourbons, which, as a result of all this bloodshed, established itself on the Spanish throne, is illegitimate for the Carlists. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the Basques, no matter how thrice reactionary Carlists they were, supported the Republicans during the civil war of 1936-1939. And the victory of the Francoists, who returned the Bourbons to power, became another historical insult for them.

So Juan himself, if he lived in other times and if by profession he was not a cook, but a bomber, he would stuff not toads, but dynamite into the soup of honored guests. That’s because what abysses of the national subconscious are revealed when watching a seemingly trifling, but charming Basque clowning.