The political Catalanism of my generation, and I would even say the guiding idea of what a public servant is, is founded on two stories supposedly based on real events that, through repetition at lunches and dinners, ended up in the realm of legend. The first was that of the Most Honorable Jordi Pujol forcing the Mossos helicopter transporting him to land during one of his compulsive journeys across the country with the simple aim of scolding a farmer who was recklessly burning a pile of dry leaves near the forest. The second was the rumor that Mayor Maragall, the architect of the Games, would occasionally show up at a Barcelona family's home to sleep and inquire about their daily life and the neighborhood's problems. The first story determined the character of a threatening president (because bad news, bombs, and the corrosive wrath of the gods usually fall from the sky) who was always ready to punish you if you had sinned; the second shaped the imaginary of a seductively transformative, undisciplined, and anarchic mayor, with enough crazy ideas to end up sleeping in your bed and stealing half your breakfast.
The same does not happen with the direction of the film by the Benecé souls (directors Josep M. Mañé, Francesca Catalán and executive producer Xavier Atance) who sign a piece of exasperating antiquity and evident poor craftsmanship in the most elemental television technique. It helps little that the good foundational idea of the film, Lluna curiously approaching the legendary character who had occupied her bed as a child, features a protagonist who is not historically up to a politician who is too big for her and whom she approaches with an exasperatingly childish didactic spirit. Be that as it may, for those of us who experienced the Olympic Games as a real childhood dream, it is important to see Maragall i la Lluna, not only to recall some of the clichés about the character, but above all because works of art and journalism are always read from the present and it is interesting to contrast the topical-mythological characterology of Maragallism (the city's opening to the sea, the unpredictable politician, and so on) with a present led by deputies and councilors of unheard-of mediocrity.
It is interesting to contrast the topical-mythological characterology of Maragallism with a present led by deputies and councilors of unheard-of mediocrityIn one of the segments of the documentary, the former mayor of Girona Quim Nadal remembering with goosebumps how, barely finished the opening ceremony of the Games and when the organizing team was already breathing easy with the success of it all, Maragall took him and some friends to dinner atEls Pescadors (the magnificent restaurant of Pepe Maulini and Toia Duran, where baked fish is a work of art) and upon arriving at Plaça Prim all the neighbors and diners present stood up to applaud. This Olympic Barcelona, which is the Barcelona where, as Joan Manuel Serrat says, people smiled in the street without knowing why, is the existential core of Maragallism, a philosophy that relates theidealism of the Catalonia-city of Noucentismewith two things that Pasqual learns in New York when he studies at my university, the New School for Social Research: first, that a city with global pretensions must always act as the capital of a state and, second, that to be progressive, to flex culture and weave a city with enough social services, people, if possible, must have their wallets full of cash. Don't compare it with the current left...
Due to its vindictive nature, I insist, we cannot evaluate Maragall i la Lluna as a serious re-reading of Maragallism. This has already been done by some authors of the tribe like Edgar Illas (read Barcelona: Ideologías de una ciudad global), who has studied with great precision how Olympic Maragallism was also a way in which the pax with Samaranch's post-Francoism was buried in Catalonia and how the construction of a cosmopolitan city also hid the perverse will to extinguish the national conflict between Catalonia and Spain. We already know all this, certainly, but from the present it is very surprising to see some of the scenes in this film where the mayor gets on a construction machine to personally supervise how an operator demolishes an entire factory or how Pasqual goes around the world with great dignity selling Barcelona as the most beautiful city on the planet. Maragall's imaginary can be criticized as much as one wants, and also Jordi Pujol's corrupt cynicism, but criticism of these politicians can only be made from admiration. They were men of power, with ideas in their heads, and superhuman strength.
Maragall's imaginary can be criticized as much as one wants, and also Jordi Pujol's corrupt cynicism, but criticism of these politicians can only be made from admirationWhile watching Maragall and the MoonI thought much more about Lluna's society than about Pasqual's Barcelona, inthis our Catalonia that approaches 14-F with the population absolutely disenchanted before candidates who run a campaign without a single idea that does not surpass the inframental and with an aesthetic taste in posters and slogans that would not even pass the first year of a design school. This servant is a militant enemy of nostalgia, but gosh, it's incredibly hard not to fall into it when listening to the narration of a political life determined by ingenuity and an idea of a city for which many had no choice but to abandon for a few seconds the baked sea bream they were enjoying to start applauding. Seen in perspective, for someone to dare to religate Maragallism with the Colauist movement (no matter how much some of its driving agents like Jordi Borja have approached it) is an insult to intelligence, because Colau represents precisely the stingy spirit of the neighbors who protested against Barcelona's opening to the sea, shielding themselves with the argument that the beach bars had a lot of history, when we all know they stank of shit.
Contemplating Maragall jumping for joy next to the Montjuïc fountains in the mythical image of the black trench coat, you can only mourn this present of a dismal grayness. The nineties had many excesses that we are now paying for, and the Olympic city model created a pattern that, as the Forum demonstrated, could not be perpetuated in cheap imitations. Yes and absolutely yes. But in those days you could dream that the mayor would come to sleep at your house or that the president of the country would scold you if you misbehaved. Now you would give each of them a good scolding, and if a politician threatened to come to your house, you would tremble with fear and hide your glassware for fear of it being stolen. Maragall is the complete opposite of our time, where the bar is systematically lowered and the left traffics with the poverty of its voters with a prostituted morality. The important thing about that '92, dear Lluna, was not that the mayor came to sleep at your house, but that we all came to think that one day he would show up at ours.
*The documentary Maragall i la Lluna, a production by Benecé Produccions and the Fundació Catalunya Europa, premiered at the BCN Film Fest in June 2020 and arrived in cinemas last January 29. In Barcelona, it can be seen at the Verdi, Renoir Floridablanca, Cinemes Girona and Balmes Multicines.