Like almost everything good and bad in life, Eugenio’s success came by chance. This is the story of a boy who designed jewelry in Barcelona in the 70s and who was engaged to be married in the Church as God commanded in those times. But one day he saw a girl on the street and couldn’t help but follow her.
Eugenio fell in love with Conchita and that changed his life. He left his girlfriend, said goodbye to the jewelry store, learned to play the guitar and joined his lover to form a musical duo, Els Dos, which sang melodic tunes in bars and clubs in the Catalan capital. Without pain or glory, the truth.
The protagonist of the story told jokes since he was little in the privacy of his family. One day Conchita had to return to her native Andalusia to take care of her sick mother and Eugenio was left alone on stage. The audience wasn’t moved by his songs, so he told a joke. Laughter. Other. More laughter.
David Trueba directs They Know That, a biopic of Eugenio that hits the big screen this Wednesday with David Verdaguer converted into a clone of the comedian par excellence of the Transition. Although you know that one is not a typical biopic. “If anyone expects it, they are wrong, because what I have shot is a film about the time in which Eugenio and Conchita were together, because the relevance of that relationship marked the comedian’s life,” Trueba points out in an interview with La Vanguardia. “Life is a lightning bolt between two darknesses,” summarizes the filmmaker.
Trueba gives some hints of Eugenio’s darkness before Conchita, but omits the one that haunted the comedian after the premature death of his wife in 1980, a victim of breast cancer. “There were 13 years of relationship, of light, although in recent times the vices were already sensed and you can imagine where the character was headed when Conchita failed him, but the essence of the character cannot be made from the anecdote because, “At the end of the day, we all have vices.”
Verdaguer, who has exceptional hearing, thus becomes the Eugenio of the years of lightning between darkness. A serious, but very funny man, dressed entirely in black, with smoked glasses, sitting on a stool, with a stem glass in one hand and a ducats in the other, ready to tell one of the 6,000 jokes in his repertoire.
Now Verdaguer is a true expert in those acudits that “were authentic scores, they worked with a kind of meter, with very studied pauses; “If you changed something, the whole joke fell apart, because Eugenio started with music and he played with that when it came to making humor,” says the actor.
Getting into character hasn’t been easy. If the viewer closes his eyes, he will hear Eugenio’s authentic voice, speaking or singing, if he opens his eyes, he will see the real Eugenio thanks to the makeup team that “during filming spent an hour and 40 minutes every morning transforming Verdaguer, in giving him a false nose and in metamorphosing his beard and hair, which have nothing to do with the comedian’s,” a proud Trueba emphasizes: “The result is spectacular.”
Verdaguer has a gift. He gives La Vanguardia one of Eugenio’s jokes with the voice of Eugenio, the one from NASA. He confesses that he can imitate many people and that the voices of Gracita Morales, Jordi Pujol and Pasqual Maragall come out very well, but he hesitates and does not dare to do more because “I am very shy.” And that was also the essence of Eugenio, who “was so funny because of his great shyness, as happens to many actors, who say something funny to break the ice and not have to make conversation,” concludes Trueba, who does not seem embarrassing at all. .
Eugenio’s unforgettable jokes, which were recorded on the extinct cassettes of the 70s and 80s, are part of Know that and often serve as a common thread to advance the plot of the film. Like the one who says “it’s a guy who goes to the perfume store and asks: ‘Do you have shampoo?’. ‘For oily hair or for dry hair?’ ‘Don’t they have one for dirty hair?’” Or maybe they know what he said. .. “He is a man who goes to the doctor. ‘I have bad news. He has two months to live. ‘Could it be July and August?’”
