Plácido is a 1961 film from Spain, directed by Luis Garcia Berlanga.
It is a comedy-satire set on Christmas Eve, centering on a deeply cynical holiday charity event in a small Spanish town. A company called Cocinex that sells steam cookers stages a "sit a poor man at your table" promotion that is really an advertisement to sell their steam cookers. The idea is for the upper-class residents of the town to host a senior or a homeless person at their homes for Christmas dinner. To sweeten the deal, Cocinex has brought in some Spanish movie stars into town to join the rich folks and their homeless guests for dinner. However, nothing goes right. The auction is poorly organized. Cocinex fails to get any big movie stars to come and winds up settling for has-beens and nobodies. The poor and homeless that are being invited for dinner prove uncooperative. And the townsfolk who are bidding on the dinners are more concerned with their social status than helping the poor.
The eponymous Placido is quite poor himself, so poor that he, his wife, and their children are living in a public restroom. He manages to get hired as a driver in the Cocinex charity parade, but his truck, practically his only possession, is scheduled to be repossessed that night. While the rich folks of the town pretend to help the poor, Placido struggles to get them to pay him for his work so he can save his truck.
Tropes:
- Animated Credits Opening: With Clip-Art Animation, as a cut-out of a homeless man is seated at a table and continually taunted with food that he never gets to eat.
- Auction: There's a charity auction for dinner with a movie star and a bum. One man makes a bid just to impress his boss and winds up out 4,000 pesetas.
- Black Comedy:
- When Pascual the bum has an attack and seems to be dying, the bourgeois family who took him in for dinner can only blather about how their meal has been ruined. When putting him in a bed they decide they have to use the fancy sheets because the neighbors are coming.
"He's got no pulse."
"Did you try the other hand?"- Later, after he does in fact die, there's a lot of bumbling confusion as they haul his body out of the apartment and off to the hospital in Placido's truck.
- Closest Thing We Got: The family hosting Pascual the bum can't find a doctor when he has a heart attack, so they call their downstairs neighbor, Poli the dentist.
- Crappy Holidays: Everyone is thoughtless, bitter, selfish, mean. Everyone but Placido is full of hypocrisy. No one is having a good time.
- Extremely Short Timespan: Christmas Eve.
- Hypocrite: All the upper-crust of the town, who enjoy pretending as if they care about the poor but actually could not give a rat's behind about helping any of them.
- Moral Guardians: When the upper-class prigs hosting a dying bum find out that he's living with a woman without benefit of marriage, they decide they have to get the couple married before the bum dies.
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: The man who confiscates the Christmas food basket from Placido goes stalking off into the distance as the film ends.
- Satire: Ruthlessly mocks the fake charity and performative morality of the Spanish upper class.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: As the guy who took the food basket away from Placido walks off, a folk song about giving food and shelter to a starving child plays.
- Stocking Filler: Marilu is seen in a Fanservice shot where she's putting on garters. Ramiro makes sure that she has them on.
- White-Dwarf Starlet: The old actor who nobody seems to have heard of but who regards himself as a big deal, ranting about he went "five times to the Americas" to perform onstage and is too good to be in this penny-ante charity auction. When no one bids on the old actor, Gabino the event organizer suggests that he join all the seniors looking for a free meal.
