The news of the death of Milan Kundera reminded me of the deep impression that reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being caused me at the time. It’s been so long, he was a young dreamer eager to apprehend life. Now I read even more than then. I read a lot, a lot, too much to retain even a small part of the information that passes to my brain through the increasing presbyopia that I suffer from.
In addition to paper books and magazines, a spy computer program is in charge of recording the many hours I spend each day looking at screens and reports a few activity data to me weekly (it tells its true masters my entire life so they can trade with it). . I mostly read news, studies, papers, reports and essays. Also emails or WhatsApp, of course, and Twitter, let’s see how long it lasts…
Very little poetry and even less narrative. I have practically not read fictional literature for many years. And as for the sound and audiovisual channel, the same thing, a lot of news and few stories or movies. In my eagerness to know and be informed, I have become a boring, rational and productive man, you see. A man who has almost come to forget that fiction is capable of telling things that paradigmatic language, scientific communication or journalistic verismo cannot tell. Because good narrative reflects on issues as complex as drives, passions, feelings, the mechanics of chance or even the meaning of life.
Although there are those who say that it is not useful for anything other than to feed the soul -which is not little- art is also capable of explaining the ineffable and valuing the immeasurable. Sometimes he can even achieve it through a simple story that flows joyfully like a stream, energetic like a waterfall or harmonious like the swaying of the waves of the sea.
Waiting for Dalí by David Pujol succeeds. Because beyond a bright Mediterranean tale, magnificently performed and that leaves an excellent taste in the mouth, the film does not tell the story of El Bulli. He does not tell it, even though his protagonists appear, absolutely deconstructed, in it. He does not count it, even though it is framed in his landscape and his light. Even though it is filled with winks and truffled with dishes that are already icons of universal contemporary art. As much as it smells of salt, suquet, painting and nearby culture. No matter how much he plays with the omnipresent absence of the immortal Empordà genius who at six years old already wanted to be a cook and at seven, Napoleon. Will it happen at the end like in Waiting for Godot?
What he achieves is transmitting to us, between smiles, interpretive keys that are neither measurable nor inventoriable. It reveals intangibles without which it is impossible to understand the Bullinian revolution from an environment like the current one in which gastronomy, its conventions and standards, and the perception that our society has of it and chefs is light years away, even though so little time has passed. .
Keys such as illusion, passion and freedom of spirit. Also the necessary ingenuity, so undervalued and, at the same time, essential. And the magic, of course, the mystery. And the inalienable ambition to do and transcend; not by having, retaining or accumulating, which is something else.
Haven’t you visited elBulli 1846 yet? What are you waiting for? Reserve your ticket now and buy Waiting for Dalí without delay to understand the story of a dream even better.
Bonus ball: Already put, if as a server you like to eat the jar with our gastronomic sociology, another day you can see Mark Mylod’s menu. Also a good fiction film and also set in a restaurant, although the rest has nothing to do with it; neither the approach, nor the theme, nor the place, nor the landscape, nor the moment, nor the light, nor the tone. I’m just telling you this in case you want to play and observe, through chilling cinematographic hyperbole, how the story has changed.
Or maybe it’s just that, in the vague times of Waiting for Dalí, we too were young.
