SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL: Director and co-writer Eduard Cortes tries to strike a difficult balance in this pleasing comedy, making the farcical shine in this tale of a misguided heist and keeping up appearances all the way to an unexpected finale. The ending is not so much a twist as a re-examination of the circumstances that have brought his two protagonists to the point they’re at, and if you believe that the covert affairs of State and the bumbling of an amateur thief are flipsides of the same coin, then Cortes’ film may well prove to be a touching experience.
silliness played straight
Set in 1955, Hold Up! depicts a world where the whims of unseen great men are carried out – whether they know it or not – by underlings and their underlings, creating a chain of command that works like Chinese whispers, with each relayed message warping the original intent. Landa (Daniel Fanego), an advisor of exiled Argentinean President Juan Peron (deposed by a military coup) decides to secretly pawn the jewels of Peron’s late second wife, Eva, to finance their exile in Spain. But when the wife of Peron’s intended host, Spanish dictator General Franco, sees the pieces in a Madrid jewelers, she decides to claim them.
Landa’s solution, with the help of the jeweller, is to stage a robbery to recover the valuable pieces – Peron’s not very effective good luck charms – before they can be delivered. 'Anything for the General," replies loyal foot soldier Merello (Guillermo Francella) when Landa lies to him by saying the unknowing Peron chose Merello, and the old hand’s loyalty even extends to taking on a young actor, Miguel (Nicolas Cabre), who has been hanging around the Peron camp, as his associate on the job.
Nightclub interludes and a vibrant Latin jazz score set the scene, and once Miguel starts asking an exasperated Merello about the character traits of his assumed identity (hints of Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie) the comedic aspects supplant the heist plot. It’s not as broad as Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS 117 franchise, but it has a similar mix of a period setting, all vintage cars and coats, and silliness played straight as Miguel rehearses his robbery dialogue and manages to sabotage Merello casing the jewelers by having to go inside to use the bathroom.
The glowing Amaia Salamanca plays Teresa, a local nurse Miguel meets and falls in love with while on a separate errand for Landa, but it’s the various relationships between the male characters – Merello and Miguel, Landa and Merello, two Madrid police detectives assigned to the case – that are subtly developed. Despite gunshots and stakeouts Hold Up! never really becomes a thriller, but the web of unspoken understandings and shared intimacies between the various men builds to something meaningful even as it seemingly plays out in the background. By the close you might wonder if the humour was just a distraction, for both the filmmaker and the characters, diverting attention from a tragedy that was always on the cards for the expendables at the bottom of the line. It gives the simple gags a bittersweet rendering.
