Can a barnacle catch fire? Are you going to laugh a lot if I draw one on your arm? This and other questions loaded with metaphysical meaning were asked by Barcelona adolescents Fernando Martínez Fernández and Juan González Gutiérrez, today in their thirties, while they were dying of boredom in the Teresianas of Ganduxer. It was then that the name that would make them known as Collective, Burnin’ Barnacleswhich jumped from being a silly private joke to saving them from the onomastic vulgarity to which their original surnames had condemned them.
Juan studied at ESCAC and Fernando, Nando, went through Fine Arts -he doesn’t want to talk about it too much-, he got carried away by his friend’s cinephilia and very soon they became a tandem that packaged strange and experimental shorts and a long, ‘The queen of the lizards’, which they managed to pull off based on a lot of creative impudence and having saved 20,000 euros. “When we started we were very internet oriented, sitting in the wake of Come on Nuns, the Chanantes and some Barcelona comedians like Carlo Padial”Nando explains.
Now, at the Malaga Film Festival, the couple has found ‘The fantastic case of the Golem’, a leap of consideration to commercial cinema, thanks to the efforts of the production company Aquí y allá, a professional budget and a cast with which hard-fought directors would come up against a song in their teeth. There is nothing: Brays Efe (in a role far from Paquita Salas in which she claims a new masculinity), Bruna Cusí, Anna Castillo, Luis Tosar, Roberto Álamo and Nao Albet, in addition to Javier Botetwhich needs a separate explanation.
humor in another way
Cusí and Botet, who once starred in ‘La reina de los lizards’, are on their way to becoming fetish actors for the Burnin’ family. With a non-standard physique, a product of Marfan syndrome, extremely thin, Botet has worked in Hollywood and especially with Guillermo del Toro. The great challenge for the directors was to place that unlikely couple on the same plane because Botet is two meters tall and Cusí is almost 50 centimeters shorter.
The look of these two directors is special: “Our intention is to use humor in another way, reclaiming the importance it has for us but moving it away from mere entertainment a bit, looking for a message and an aesthetic without renouncing that the viewer passes it on. well”, explains Juan. whatHow to explain the eccentric style of the Burnin’? It is a salad that points to WhatsApp groups, the pop aesthetic of Almodovar, the fearlessness of Wes Andersonthe mischief of ‘The Big Lebowski’ or some gif seen around: “It was a moment of ‘Top Secret’, that crazy ZAZ movie, in which a guerrilla fighter punches a Nazi soldier who falls from a turret and breaks into pieces of ceramic on the ground. We liked it a lot and we thought about what would happen when the family had to recognize the remains. That was the germ of the story & rdquor ;.
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This idea also feeds the shocking -in all senses- first sequence of the ‘Golem’, with reference to the memorable credits of the series ‘Mad Men’, and makes it very clear that we are in genuine Burnin’ territory. A very crazy science fiction story in which falling apart becomes possible after the discovery of the existence of golems -clay dolls built by a company- that have replaced people and deaths due to crushing of pianos become a pandemic due to the failure of an algorithm.
Such is the eagerness of this couple to distort reality that it has made many of the actors participating in it are unrecognizable “in a manipulation that generates a pleasant tension & rdquor;: there is a Tosar taken out of context, “like a Julio Iglesias out of place & rdquor;; a delirious Nao Albet, an Álamo with a toupee and the great challenge is to recognize Tito Valderde. “We had the script almost finished but until we have configured their respective characters with them we have not considered it finished& rdquor ;.