The Barcelona of Ventura Pons

Summer, short-sleeved shirts, Gothic Quarter, the sound of a guitar, a blue Citroën 2CV, torn walls and worn apartment doors, a republican Miró poster on the wall, a bottle of Larios. We went to find Woody Allen to do our portrait, while Ventura Pons, another who made a film a year, had been imbuing his frames with the uninhibited, decadent, joyful, and catchy Barcelona essence for years.

Allen's vision of us was elitist, a showcase and souvenir, Iberian, soaked in sangria, expatriating and for expats, refined, heavily made-up. Ventura Pons, on the other hand, confessed a different, alternative, "rascally," punk, rumba, traumatic, and Mediterranean identity. Pons's Barcelona is Catalan, with all its infinite flaws and contradictions, while Allen's Barcelona simply does not exist, no matter how much he filled it with local extras.

There is a Barcelona that exists, that has always pulsed like an underground magma, like a language, a code, a proud humility, and there is an Instagram Barcelona that has merely sucked the aesthetic beauty out of this genuine madness. When Ventura Pons premieres by filming Ocaña, what he exposes is not the aesthetics or the costumes, but an identity. An attitude. The inner avant-garde, the intimate transgression, the makeup of the soul, the vertigo and the infinite risk of living in Barcelona and that anything can happen. Happen to you. Inside.

Surely all this no longer happens, and surely this is what happens to me. Surely it has to do with my age, with the longing for a Barcelona that was not pre-Olympic, but was aolympic, extra-olympic, para-olympic. Pons filmed like a neighbor, a brilliant neighbor, but just another neighbor who in any case frequented bohemian and clandestine corners or who simply felt an immense curiosity for the corners of his local universe. Few filters, both in the dialogues and in the actions, as well as in the actors' naturalness and the rawness of the spaces.

Theatrical, tangible, without artifice. In Què t'hi jugues, Mari Pili?, the girls are not impeccable foreign tourists voluntarily seduced by an anonymous artist/bullfighter, but a jewelry seller, a hamburger cashier, and a student for whom almost everything goes wrong and who decide to have an adventure with the first man who asks their name. I mean, they don't need an elevated conversation in front of a painting at the MNAC. Worth highlighting is the too-often-forgotten Barcelona: un mapa, the Eixample laid bare, not in terms of architecture or urbanism but of customs, neighborhood secrets, of those characteristic profiles of our stair landings.

In terms of lives and characters, Pons was daring and twisted: anything went, even if it caused scandal. Pons's Barcelona doesn't need Gaudí or Domènech i Montaner, but neither does it need the Diagonal tram or the Superilla: it needs the drunk aunt's apartment, the cellars and dens of the Raval, the cigarette butts on Sant Sebastià beach, the sheets hung on the rooftops, the blades of the Molino and a stall in the Boqueria. And the Convergència member from the first floor, fourth door, who comes out of the closet, the PP member from the second floor, third door, who would like to come out of the closet in another sense, the building doorman who has always been a socialist, but thought that had to do with socialism, the squatter activist who receives a millionaire inheritance from his grandfather. Here we all know each other, this is a village. We never quite understand each other because we understand each other perfectly.

Ventura's Barcelona is nudist, it walks naked through the street, like its characters allergic to the mediocrity that threatens them. An ambiguous, complex, transvestite identity, sea and mountain, Besòs and Llobregat, repressed and self-repressed, a seductive circus of horrors that can make you laugh as much as plunge you into the deepest depression.

Catalanness made cinema, Barcelonaness made spring air, there is not a single gaze towards this city that can dare to be gray or flat. Neon lights slide over a lover's butt in an alley, the domestic discussion from the previous scene still resonates and rises, opening up to the light of the light well, the hydraulic pavement of the hallway displays photos from military service, but also posters of the Barça lineup and the yellow and black of the taxis slap each other as they leisurely cruise, hunting for the client who will turn off the green light like when the red light of a peep show booth turns on.

No, I don't think it's age, or nostalgia: it's seeing that we haven't known how to sufficiently maintain that essence in the face of the tsunami of globalization, and that even for us it has become small. Our greatness, yes, has become small for us. All the tourists in the world can come to visit us, or make movies set in the city, but they won't see us anymore. They don't see us anymore. It's not an era, and it's not Ventura Pons, that has disappeared.