Un Franc, 14 Pesetas

One movie I have seen since living in Barcelona is the movie Un Franc, 14 Pesetas. The movie was a Spanish movie, and I watched it using English subtitles to understand. While I could understand some of the Spanish being spoken, there was also some German spoken that I had no understanding of. The plot of this movie revolved around two Spanish individuals living in Madrid during the 1960s, and their travel to Switzerland in hopes of earning higher wages. The two men, Martin and Marcos go to a new country without knowing the language, and leave everything of familiarity behind, including their families, in hopes of securing a better future for themselves. The movie shows their journey of at first struggling to adapt to a completely new land to finally being reunited with their family. Here, the struggle of an immigrant back in the 1960s is portrayed excellently. In my opinion, this was a very entertaining and interesting movie. While the movie would be considered a drama as it depicted the hardships these families went through, it also had its lighthearted moments that added to the movie’s effectiveness. Overall, I thought the movie was definitely one worth seeing. I thought it did an outstanding job of showing how hard and different life was back then, and how hard it was to lead a good life and live comfortably. The only problem I really had with the movie was the ending. After several years of the family living comfortably in Switzerland and finally being acclimated with the country, they decide to move back to Madrid. I never really understood this decision, because just as they finally were living a happy and comfortable lifestyle, they threw it all away. The movie ends with the family kind of rallying to say how they will make this work, but it also leaves the uncertainty of their lives as the father does not have a job, and the last scene is the father looking out into the night with a confused expression. To me, this did not provide appropriate closure. However, I did find that it was a very well done film other than this aspect, and really provided an interesting perspective of how difficult life was for an immigrant trying to be integrated into a completely new and different society.