Barcelona today is a shining star among major cities for innovations in pedestrian safety, noise pollutions reduction, and air quality improvements such as the superblock, which I can only hope will some day be adopted by American cities as well. But it was not always so, as portrayed in Marcel Barrena’s narrative film The 47, which depicts the efforts of bus driver Manolo Vital (Edouard Fernández) to improve the lives of his neighbors in Torre Baró, an impoverished area on the fringes of the city where many internal migrants from Extremadura and Andalusia in southern Spain. They arrived in the 1950s, seeking a better life for themselves and their families, but were often treated by city officials as a nuisance not worthy of real consideration.
When we first meet the residents of Torre Baró, it’s 1958 and they’re building a shantytown on the outskirts of Barcelona, using whatever materials they can get their hands on. Time is of the essence because of a law that requires shanties to be built in a day, enforcing this through a rule that says if a house has a roof by sunrise, the authorities must allow it to stand, while if it does not, they can knock it down. They work through the night and sure enough, as the first rays of sunshine appear, so do mounted policemen who order them to stop work and move away from the buildings.
One of the unlucky builders is Vital, who didn’t manage to get a roof over his home in the time allowed, commander Ortega (Vincente Romero) orders it destroyed. In fact, no one met the deadline so everything must come down, and the sight of policemen knocking down the ramshackle walls of these hastily-built homes with giant mallets reminds me of old photographs of British officials using battering rams to destroy the homes of Irish cottages as a means of enforcing eviction orders by making the homes uninhabitable. In either case, unblinking power knowingly inflicts cruelty on people unable to defend themselves.
In such moments are leaders born: Vital rallies the community, proposing that they all work on one house each day, so as to ensure it is complete by dawn the next day. I’m not sure if this prescient moment actually happened but even if it’s fiction it’s a nice bit of screenwriting by Barrena and Alberto Marini foreshadowing Vital’s future while delivering an effective lesson on the power of using your brain and working together when faced with oppressive and unreasonable government officials.
By the late 1970s (signalled by repeated references to Star Wars), Vital has come up in the world. After a long walk through lanes barely wider than one person and down a steep and unpaved road, he takes command of an articulated city bus which he operates with great pride, exchanging easy conservation with his regular passengers who are as likely to confide their marital troubles to him as to argue the merits of different football teams. He lives in a house now, with his wife Carmen (Clara Segura) and daughter Joana (Zoe Bonafonte), both of whom have a larger role to play as the story continues. Still, the neighborhood lacks basic civic amenities like water and sewer connections, a school, and postal services, and the consequences of that lack is demonstrated in sometimes melodramatic ways. Through it all, the residents of Torre Baró function like a real community and are outraged that the city government seems determined to treat them like country cousins rather than as the Barcelona residents they see themselves to be.
It all comes to a head in the community’s struggle to get bus service to their neighborhood, which city officials claim is impossible as their streets are too steep and narrow to accommodate the city bus fleet (apparently buses only come in one size). This is an argument that may be familiar to Americans: rather than suiting municipal vehicles to the task and conditions at hand, an entrenched bureaucracy is more interested in doing things the way they’re used to doing them rather than taking a problem-solving approach to a situation.
Although The 47 is set in Spain and most of the action takes place a half a century or more ago, many of the issues facing the residents of Torre Baró will ring true with residents of any underserved neighborhood today as well as with anyone who depends on inadequate public transportation to get on with their daily lives. The citizens of Torre Baró presented as distinct individuals who also have a collective identity, with the character of Vital providing the unifying element in this sprawling story. Barrena does not glamorize the living conditions in the neighborhood but grants the residents the dignity appropriate to human beings who are doing their best to improve their lives while facing conditions that would defeat most of us. | Sarah Boslaugh
The 47 is distributed on DVD by Kino Lorber. The only extras on the disc are trailers for this film and 4 others.
