Like almost all good and bad things in life, Eugenio’s success came by chance. This is the story of a boy who designed jewelry in Barcelona in the seventies and who was engaged to marry in the Church as God commanded in those days. But one day he saw a girl on the street and couldn’t help but follow her.
Eugenio fell in love with Conchita and this 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, who sang melodic tunes in bars and nightclubs in the Catalan capital. They did it without shame or glory, the truth.
The protagonist of the story told jokes from a young age in the privacy of the 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 getting excited about his songs, so he told a joke. Laughs. Another. More laughs.
David Trueba directs Saben oquel a biopic of Eugenio that arrives this Wednesday on the big screen with David Verdaguer turned into a clone of the comedian par excellence of the Transition, although Saben oquel is not a biopic in use . “If anyone expects it, they are wrong, because what I have shot is a film about the time when Eugenio and Conchita were together, because the relevance of that relationship marked the comedian’s life ”, says Trueba in an interview with La Vanguardia. “Life is a flash between two darknesses”, sums up the filmmaker.
Trueba gives some brushstrokes of the darkness of Eugenio before Conchita, but omits the one that haunted the comedian after the premature death of his wife in 1980, a victim of breast cancer. “It was 13 years of relationship, of light, but recently the vices were already intuited and you can already imagine where the character headed when Conchita was missing. However, the essence of a person cannot be made from an anecdote because, at the end of the day, we all have vices”.
Verdaguer, who has an exceptional ear, becomes the Eugenio of the years of the flash in the dark. A serious, but very funny man, dressed entirely in black, with smoked glasses, sitting on a stool, with a tube glass in one hand and a Ducado in the other, ready to tell one of the 6,000 jokes in his repertoire.
Now Verdaguer is a real expert in these jokes, which “were authentic scores, they worked with a kind of metric, with well-studied pauses; if you changed something, the whole joke would fall apart, because Eugenio started with music and that’s what he played with when making humor,” says the actor.
Getting into the character has not been easy. If the viewer closes his eyes, he will hear the authentic voice of Eugenio, speaking or singing, if he opens them, he will see the real Eugenio thanks to the work and grace of the make-up team that “during the filming spent 1 hour and 40 minutes every morning to transform Verdaguer, put on a fake nose and metamorphose his beard and hair, which have nothing to do with the comedian’s”, underlines a proud Trueba: “The result is spectacular”.
Verdaguer has a gift. Give La Vanguardia one of Eugenio’s jokes in Eugenio’s voice, the one about 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 cuts himself off and doesn’t dare to do more because, he says: “I’m very shy”. And this was also the essence of Eugenio, who “was so funny because of his great shyness, as happens to many actors, who let go of something funny to break the ice and not have to talk”, concludes the director David Trueba, who doesn’t seem embarrassed at all.
Eugenio’s unforgettable jokes, which were recorded on the extinct cassettes of the seventies and eighties, are part of Saben aquello and often serve as a thread to advance the film’s plot.
Like the one who says: “It’s a guy who goes to the perfume shop and asks: ‘Do they have shampoo?’ ‘For oily hair or for dry hair?’. “Don’t they have one for dirty hair?” Or maybe they know what he says. .. “It’s a man who goes to the doctor. ‘I have bad news. He has two months left to live’. ‘Could it be July and August?'”.
