Back to the beginning | Opinion by Mario Garcés

The year was 1982the year of Naranjito, of the unappealable victory of Felipe Gonzalez and that legendary concert of the Rolling Stones at the Vicente Calderón. That day, Mick Jagger left his lethargy at a table in the Café Hafa in Tangier to make his presence felt in democratic Spain. And so it was that the king of their Satanic Majesties appeared wrapped in a Spanish flag in front of 60,000 souls.

Forty years later He came to pay homage to the sculpture of the Fallen Angel at the Retiro.erected at 666 meters above sea level, the cabalistic number of the devil. Perhaps the antichrist that gave birth Álex de la Iglesia in Madrid’s Kio Towers would have had to be born at the foot of that pond.

It is also the fortieth anniversary of the premiere of. Back to the beginning by José Luis Garci, the first Spanish production to win an Oscar. A film denigrated by the Spanish critics during the first months of its release until the establishment The neutral American industrial establishment appreciated a quality that some paid gazetteer of the cultureta did not perceive, enraptured then by by-products such as Pepi, Luci, Bom and other girls of the heap..

For the youngest, the protagonist, Antonio Ferrandis, the Chanquete of Verano Azul for consumers of the kitsch returns to Spain, to Gijón, after many years in the United States. A call from the King Juan Carlos Iat the beginning of the film, we learn that it is Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ex-player of Sporting de Gijón, the board of directors pays tribute to him, but, soon, we will know the true meaning of his journeyHe wants to pass a subject he did not pass in the postwar period and, in view of his imminent death, he wants to is to see Encarna Paso againhis first girlfriend, whom he always loved and from whom the cruel fate of a Spain in ruins separated him. Between “Do you remember?” and “Yes, I remember”, he will settle the debt with the past to finally return to Berkeley to die.

Well, for the most ignorant, Back to topfar from being a tearful pastiche, was and is the true film of the Spanish transition.. Because Garci, unlike others such as Fernán-Gómez, discards speaking cinematographically of the Second Republic and the Civil War. The film, first and foremost vitalist and illusionist in a society that is always bent on death, articulates a clear vision of the end of history.

The past has come to an end because we are already in democracy, and the only possible transformations from now on already depend on life cycles. Nostalgia is a disease that has a cure in Garci.because the protagonist is finally redeemed, without looking at the past with resentment. Quite the opposite of what some people do now, who are only capable of looking back with anger and disenchantment.