The raffish charisma and sinister, saturnine handsomeness of Javier Bardem is what raises this movie above the standard of soap-opera … mostly. Certainly, it would be less without that great slab of a beau-moche face looming over the action, more heavy-lidded and sensual in middle age: part matinee idol, part gargoyle. This is a workplace comedy-satire from Spanish film-maker Fernando Léon de Aranoa, and it has been a huge success on his home turf. His 2005 film Mondays in the Sun also starred Bardem as one of a crowd of morose guys coming to terms with unemployment – but here Bardem goes from worker to management by playing Blanco, the owner of a successful factory making scales, a product which is to do much metaphorical heavy lifting in the drama that follows. These range from tiny hi-tech kitchen gadgets to huge agricultural scales, for weighing out livestock.
Blanco prides himself on a condescendingly fatherly approach to his workforce, often giving speeches sentimentally reminding his staff he has no children with his elegant wife Adela (Sonia Almarcha) and claiming that they are all his family. But it is a very dysfunctional family and Blanco is in fact blandly and complacently sexist and racist. He is in the habit of seducing attractive female interns (the film reveals that he creepily has a certain “type”) and dismissing them at the end of their placement with a little gift of jewellery. Blanco’s company is up for an industry award, but there are problems with his executive team and Blanco is furious that a certain worker, Jose (Óscar de la Fuenta) whom he has just made redundant with a derisory payoff, has now set up a protest camp just outside the factory which could sour the judges’ mood on their way in.
