The National Shotgun

Written on May 11th, 2025 by A. M. Alcazar

As hunting season opens and locals in towns gather, Jaume, a Catalan salesman played by Spanish giant José Sazatornil, arrives in Madrid to sell a new device: a door buzzer. He grapples with the locals who believe they are a bastion of tradition resisting the immorality of progress: godlessness, female agency, modernity. It is their fixation with tradition that blinds them: they are inhabiting the worst version of what they outwardly resist—adulteries, the fetishisation of women, and public displays of onanism.

Jaume has been accompanied by his secretary, Mercé, a beautiful young woman. Following the advice of a local, they are pretending to be married in order to keep the appearances. At the end of the day, the pretend couple retreats to their room. Mercé sits on the bed in her underwear. Jaume stands by the en-suite door crossing his legs to stop himself from urinating. He finds a bedpan, pees in it, and farts. It couldn’t be more unsexy. In their conversation, a woman barges in the room and pushes the wall to reveal a secret wardrobe. Her husband and his best friend are inside masturbating as they peek through a hole. In this reverse Belle de Jour, we are surprised to see they weren’t stalking Mercé, but peeping an older woman in the adjacent room wearing more clothes than Mercé. As the wife, her husband and his friend leave, the woman turns around to deliver her one word sermon: “Cochinos!” (Pigs).

The film ends with a title card that says something like: “They weren’t happily ever after… it’s the misfortune that will persist as long as there are ministers and administrators”. This is a discordant proclamation by Berlanga when the 85 minutes of the film focuses on the questionable behaviour of individuals across all strata of this village. The takeaway is not how the bourgeoisie corrupt societies. The key is in the behaviour of the villagers. It exposes how we hold two beliefs at the same time whilst being oblivious to that very contradiction. Morality does not become obscured for everyone but the pious. Morality morphs and when it does, the ground we stand on shifts unbeknownst to us. Our misery is not the contradiction, it is ignoring how we are being led astray.

Originally published on Letterboxd.