There were those who said that Carlos Saura owed the Golden Bear, the Berlin Festival's top trophy, to Tejero, because Deprisa, deprisa won it just twenty-four hours after February 23, and the filmmaker who left us a year ago was almost to request political asylum. But the truth is that, seen in all its splendor – that is, restored in 4k – four decades later, the film remains as young and free as the real criminals from the outskirts of Madrid who appear in it. And it was the best film in the Berlin competition, in which Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón also participated with Maravillas, another film about juvenile delinquency.
Those were times when the so-called quinqui cinema, a crude reflection of a marginal reality marked by heroin, from Perros calleys (José Antonio de la Loma, 1977) to Navajeros (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1980), broke the box office. And Hurry, Hurry, with its iconic poster designed by Cruz Novillo, was in fact the highest-grossing film of those produced by Elías Querejeta – producer of Saura, from The Hunt (1965) to Sweet Hours (1982) –. But the interest of the director of Cría cuervos (1977) in those wayward kids was genuine, not at all exploitative.
He was able to approach them thanks to Francisco Querejeta, Fanfis, brother of the producer, who had been filming for Villaverde for Marginados, a documentary series that was never completed. This is how he met José Antonio Valdelomar, alias El Mini; Jesus Arias Aranzueque; José María Hervás Roldán and the very magnetic Berta Socuéllamos Zarco, who were more or less, depending on the case, in the transition from soft to hard drugs. In the film, they form a gang of robbers not very different from reality. Scared to death, Saura accompanied them on their races, and polished the dialogues with them until they came out natural, impregnated with their own street language. Again with the help of cinematographer Teo Escamilla, Saura portrayed them beautiful and vital: without detracting from other more tremendous exponents of quinqui cinema, Saura's fascinated gaze, clean of moral judgments, stands out for its delicate lyricism and tenderness with that embraces these young people, inevitable tragic figures, who became fleeting icons of our cinema.
The film also marks a whole pirouette in his career, bringing him back to his beginnings in documentary film, and rhyming with his first work of fiction, Los golfos (1959), also starring real marginalized people from the Madrid periphery. At the same time, his well-remembered soundtrack can be heard as the prefiguration of his flamenco trilogy with Antonio Gades – made up of Bodas de sangre (1981), Carmen (1983) and El amor brujo (1986) –, and all the musicals that came. after.
Music is almost omnipresent in the first part of the film, when the gang alternates robberies and robberies with disco moments, horseback riding through contaminated wastelands and a getaway to a beach in Almería, so that Ángela can see the sea. In the most sober credits in the world – black background with sky blue letters – the immortal rumba of Los Chunguitos is already playing, Oh!, What Pain, which continues playing when the film starts, with Pablo (Valdelomar) and Meca (Aranzueque). ) stuck in a stolen car that won't start. Like the ballad Me stay with you, also by Los Chunguitos and very happily recovered by Rosalía at the Goya 2019, it will be played again several times in the film. Shortly after fleeing in the stolen car, Meca will put a few pesetas in the jukebox in a bar so that Lole and Manuel will play and Pablo will ask Ángela out, with whom they will form a Bonnie-style couple.
The rarefied atmosphere of the Transition is noticeable during an excursion to the Cerro de los Ángeles, where they will be despised by a couple of Francoist ladies and searched by the police. They, in turn, both in the film and outside of it, also despised the honest workers, although at the same time Angela harbored the dream of buying an apartment, as if they could have some future together. There is a scene in which they even seem like a parody of a bourgeois marriage, she taking care of her plants and he reading Mortadelo y Filemón in bed, as if it were the day's newspaper. But, as Pablo prophetically repeats when Angela, playing, points a gun at him, “weapons are carried by the devil.”
They were condemned to live quickly, quickly, and to die even faster. This was the case for Valdelomar and Aranzueque, who continued to enter and leave prison after filming the film. The first, who never performed again, died of an overdose at the age of thirty-four, in Carabanchel, where he was serving his sentence. Aranzueque, who reappeared in The Animated Forest (José Luis Cuerda, 1987), died that same year, 1992. But Ángela, that is Berta Socuéllamos Zarco, disappeared from the public eye. It seems that she married José María Hervás Roldán, and that they never took drugs or committed crimes again. Of four, two were saved.
