‘Landa’: sun and shadow of an extraordinary actor

The starting point of the script for Landa is Alfredo el Grande. Vida de un cómico, a memoir book by the Spanish actor published in 2008 and written by Marcos Ordóñez, theater critic for this newspaper and a keen observer of the workings of the art of acting. The Silex publishing house has rescued these essential memoirs, long out of print, on the occasion of the premiere of the documentary, directed by Gracia Querejeta and Miguel Olid, which celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the filming of El puente, the film by Juan Antonio Bardem that changed the fate of a genius of acting.

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For years, Alfredo Landa carried the stigma of the so-called landismo — a comic subgenre of Spanish cinema that portrayed, in a crude yet popular way, the drifts of Francoist developmentalism — until Bardem realized that behind the buffoon who set the archetype of the Spanish man with a beret chasing after the Swedish blonde, there was something more. El puente is a road movie about a mechanic who escapes from a stifling Madrid on his Montesa motorcycle to spend a long weekend in Torremolinos. On that journey south, the face of landismo sheds its comic expression and transforms into something else as it gains critical awareness of the country and its realities.

A pivotal film between the first and second stages of his career, Landa recalls in his memoirs that when Bardem’s call came (a communist filmmaker far from the actor’s political ideas) he was “flabbergasted” and accepted: “For me, Bardem was, fundamentally, the only director who had dedicated a film to those of our tribe.” Landa was referring to Cómicos (1954), which he saw while studying, with the enormous determination that characterized his life, in San Sebastián. From Bardem on, critics began to take him seriously and his filmography changed.

Landa, the documentary, is a well-structured entry point through talking heads, memories, and films with which Querejeta and Olid offer a stimulating exercise of light and shadow that avoids hagiography of an extraordinary actor whom no one expected. Landa probes the particularities of his talent, his torrential and visceral character, his ideological conflicts, his likes and dislikes, his adaptability, and his fondness for mus. Also, his professionalism and craft, his tenacity, his love for his wife and children, and his unfiltered memoirs.

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In her maturity, Lola Flores said she remained a beautiful woman “because the sparkle in the eyes cannot be operated on.” That sparkle links her with Alfredo Landa, who probably had the most expressive eyes in Spanish cinema and who, with his appearance as an ordinary Spanish man, managed to convey a range of emotions reserved only for the greatest. Everything fit into that gaze that took him from a broad-stroke popular cinema to the podium at the Cannes festival in 1984 thanks to the character Paco el Bajo in Los santos inocentes, in which the actor fused his reading of Humiliated and Insulted by Dostoevsky, with Delibes and with the unconditional love gaze of a poor dog to his abusive master.

What happened with that award (Paco Rabal won ex aequo the best male actor award when, according to Landa, the original intention was to give it only to him) is a chapter not to be missed in the actor’s memoirs that this documentary collects and contrasts. And if this book-film dialogue is remarkable, it is because it responds to that and other chiaroscuros of a gifted actor.

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