Abracadabra: Madrid!
Neither the director Pablo Berger nor José Mota are from Madrid, but both chose the city as theirs years ago and they are still here. In Abra Cadabra, his third film, after Torremolinos 73 and Snow White, Berger finally dares to set a story in that Madrid that he likes so much. Because Abracadabra is very Madrid, although it is only one of the many Madrids that exist within the city.
“Madrid fascinates me as a city, because the towers of Chamartín coexist with a tavern where they sell torreznos and squid sandwiches, the cupcake and the batons coexist”, says the director born in Bilbao and that he spent a decade in New York before settling in the capital. “Madrid is a city where there are also barriers, where the M-30 marks a border. My protagonists live outside that M-30, we have created a neighborhood that is a bit Moratalaz , a little Carabanchel , a little talk and a little Mostoles …”.
Mota, Verdú and Berger.
Its protagonists are Maribel Verdu, a choni mother; Anthony DeLa Torre, husband and father, but about a madridista, and Joseph Motte, the security cousin of a supermarket and fond of hypnotism. The three move around that city on the other side of the M-30. They shot on a ring road "at the height of the Barrio de la Concepción, on bridges over the M-30, some exteriors in Legazpi, the exterior of a wedding hall called La Noria in Torrejón de la Calzada."
But they also shot in the center of Madrid, where the modern city is but also the usual one: that of the Gold Room n (where the _Abracadabra sounds) _ and the nebraska coffee shop with their snacks of ladies and gentlemen of pancakes with cream.
Pancakes in Nebraska.
Abracadabra is a tribute to the city, to a Madrid that is still reluctant to disappear. “The Madrid that portrays Abra Cadabra, it is one of the realities of Madrid”, José Mota tells us.
“Pablo shows it with a wonderful sense of humor and a particular aesthetic, he comes to summarize the end of the 70s, all of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s in a splendid x-ray and draws with a brushstroke a part of the social reality of this country through through that aesthetic. But Madrid is many Madrids, it is that, it is the modern Madrid, the Madrid of the third age, Madrid is eternal”.
MY ARRIVAL IN MADRID
“I came in 1987, I've been in Madrid longer than in Montiel (Ciudad Real), where I was born. I remember that the first time I came to Madrid, the sensation that the city produced in me was very, very similar to what I imagined in my beloved Mancha before coming, and that captivated me. I was 14 or 15 years old then. I remember that I was playing the song by Paloma San Basilio in the streets: Together, coffee for two, half-smoking a cigarette._ And meccano it was in full effervescence… It's just that Madrid was the pear”.
WHAT I LIKE MOST ABOUT MADRID
“Madrid has a soul super warm, It is the city of all, it embraces those who come from outside. I felt it the first day and it's still like that, I think it's the main greatness of it. It's chaotic, sometimes messy, but wonderful. This coexistence between the urban and the rural it has, it gives Madrid that special warmth and that is why it seems to me to be a unique city”.
Run, little horse.
MY FIRST MADRID
“As soon as I arrived, I lived on Avenida Vinateros, on Calle del Corregidor Señor de la Elipa, in a tiny apartment that was 45 m2. It was a midget thing that I shared a while. From there I went to Ercilla street, by Embajadores. And from there to Agustín Durán street, to the Guindalera neighborhood, by Francisco Silvela. And from there to the City of Journalists, where I have lived all my life.”
MY (GREAT) NIGHT IN MADRID
“To talk about nightlife in Madrid I have to go back to my beginnings, when I arrived. I remember the time of Stella, a nightclub that Mecano alludes to in his song Bailando salsa, it was the last throes of the Movida madrileña, years 89 and 90. Everybody went there: Almodóvar, Alaska… It was a wonderful place. We also moved around Moncloa, in a place called The Salt, the Empire in Paseo de Recoletos… The number of years that have passed. We were also going to Capital or to Pacha. Madrid was a party every night.
I remember performing with my partner in a nightclub in Ventas, and in nightclubs in the center of Madrid, such as the Golden, Windsor, Xenon, Caribbean. So there was a culture of nightclubs as a nest or refuge for comedy, for comedians. There was more comedy in nightclubs than in theater. And I remember that we performed at one in the morning, it was very surreal, but when the television networks arrived the flow of the night began to fall.
Abracadabra in the Golden Room.
MY NEIGHBORHOOD BARS
His character in Abracadabra goes to breakfast in a cup of coffee with batons every morning at Biarritz bar in Moratalaz. “I have not been a coffee grower, I have not frequented many bars in the neighborhoods where I have lived, except the haima, an Alfredo Marquerie bar, so I've been there a lot. And I just remembered that in Agustín Durán, we used to go to a bar-restaurant called The good taste, where we ate the menu of the day, we had our friends, that perhaps has been the one in which I have been most involved with friends and people from the neighborhood".
MY CORNERS OF MADRID
“In the absence of a beach, Madrid has wonderful corners. Retirement I'm lovin 'it. And I used to go to the Cottage".
