Rafael Azcona, ‘Belle Epoque’ Writer, Set for New York Tribute 

“The Spanish Cinema has only had one genius: Rafael Azcona,” Oscar winner Fernando Trueba has said. 

Screening “Belle Époque,” the film which won Trueba his Academy Award and was lead written by Azcona, this week’s New York showcase, The Goya Goes To – New Spanish Films, affords a priceless opportunity to shed light on a figure who has shaped Spanish cinema past and present yet remains little-known in the U.S.

It is organized by Spain’s Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, ICAA film agency and ICEX export and trade investment board in a year when ICEX is pushing to highlight Spanish talent via a campaign Where Talent Ignites – Spanish Audiovisual in Spain. But what was Azcona’s?

France has its New Wave, Italy its neorealism. If Spain has an authentic filmic tradition, it was forged in part by Azcona, co-writing Italian Marco Ferreri’s “The Little Apartment” (1958) and “El Cochecito” (1960), both adapting Azcona novels, and Spain’s Luis Berlanga‘s “Placido”(1961) and “The Executioner” (1963), the latter rated by critics and Film Affinity voters as the greatest Spanish film ever made. 

Made as Spanish cinema fell under the thrall of neorealism in the late ‘50s, the films brought a new acerbity to the mix, channeling a very Spanish esperpento black humor, whose creator Ramón del Valle-Inclán famously claimed that “Spain is a deformation of Europe.”

With Spain still devastated from a ghastly Civil War, the harder-edged darkly comic movies begged to differ from the myths of material progress sold by Francisco Franco’s dictatorial regime which still governed Spain.

Characters battle to attain basic emblems of the American Dream, such as a flat (“The Little Apartment,” “The Executioner”) or some form of car (“El Cochecito,” “Placido”). They fail and fail ludicrously. Chance, mishap, chaos and compromise sweep mild-mannered José Luis in “The Executioner” from being caught in bed with Spain’s state executioner’s daughter to being dragged to an execution chamber as Spain’s new official garrotte expert but looking for all the world as if he is just about to be executed. 

With such harder-edged neorealist comedies, Azcona, Berlanga and Ferreri nailed the fundamental lack of freedom and the tyranny of circumstance of the society created by Franco. 

Some of which seeps decades later into “Belle Epoque” (1992), which Azcona lead wrote, along with Fernando Trueba and José Luis Garcia Sánchez. It begins with Fernando, a young deserter from the Spanish army in 1930, wandering the countryside trying to live his life. He’s soon arrested and handcuffed by two Civil Guards. Its hero is Manolo, an aged freethinker. 

For Azcona, the best films end in suicide, director David Trueba and one his closest friends, observes. “Belle Epoque” is book-ended by two. 

Also, it’s a comedy of frustration. Fernando falls in love with each one of Manolo’s four daughters, but the first three, after one-off sex, reject a long-term relationship. He does marry Luz, played by an 18-year-old Penelope Cruz. He leaves for America, chasing another myth, the American Dream. 

What else did Azcona bring to the table? He cast himself as an agent provocateur: “I’ve got nothing to say: I just begin or conspire in something somebody else finishes.” The directors he worked with, however, begged to differ. “We were united by a common pessimism as to society and its miseries, how they cannibalize individuals, liquidating all freedom and dreams,” Luis Berlanga wrote in Spanish newspaper ABC on March 26 2008, two days after Azcona’s death. 

“But I was always indecisive, unsatisfied: He was the executive brain with the art of creating an impeccable structure packed with witty humor,” Berlanga recognized.

For “Belle Epoque,” Trueba, Azcona and José Luis García Sánchez met for lunch over 18 months, talking about the characters’ stories and sequences. “Then one day, he took out his little notebook. If you worked with Azcona, that was the key moment,” Trueba recalls in Fernando Olmeda’s 2010 RTVE documentary “Imprescindibles: Rafael Azcona.”      

Structure in “Belle Epoque” is all. One ending is upbeat: Fernando gets his girl. But the real ending is more tempered. Manolo’s daughters, wife and Fernando, now a good friend of Manolo’s, all abandon him. The film leaves him in near total solitude.  

“What we have to learn from Rafael Azcona is to look at human beings with humor and compassion,” Fernando Trueba says in “Imprescindibles.” 

For much of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Azcona lived with his wife Susan Youdelman in Madrid but worked in Italy, co-writing, for example, Ferreri’s biggest scandal and box office success, “La Grand Bouffe.” In it, four middle-aged men, suffering ennui, meet to literally eat themselves to death. 

Azcona penned seven films by Carlos Saura. They had LOL moments. In “My Cousin Angelica” (1974), for instance, the protagonist’s uncle comes back wounded from the Spanish Civil War dressed in the uniform of the fascist Falange, his arm permanently fixed by a plaster cast at the angle of a fascist salute. Spain’s die-hard Francoist right was outraged. Barcelona’s Balmes cinema suffered a bomb explosion. As critic Diego Galán noted, the film’s large box office – 25 million pesetas by September 1974 – was a vote for a Spanish cinema crying out for change in Spain. 

Azcona wrote two exceptional films with José Luis Cuerda: “The Enchanted Forest” (1987) and “Butterfly” (1999). Penned with David Trueba, Manuel Angel Egea and Carlos López, Fernando Trueba’s “The Girl of Your Dreams” (1998) gave Penélope Cruz her first fully-starring role.  

Yet Azcona remains unknown in the U.S. He was, it must be said, tremendously timid. A video clip of Azcona accepting Spain’s 1982 National Prize for Cinematography, has him walking smartly to a table of dignitaries, shaking everyone’s hands highly politely but as fast as he could as if they were suffering some strange virus. Clutching a diploma, he retreats back to the audience without further ado. 

Azcona did not attend any of the ceremonies to accept the five Goya Awards he co-won for screenplay. 

There are few photos of him. The one Variety obtained is a snap on his terrace taken by wife Susan Youdelman, who will attend the New York “Belle Epoque” screening.   

In private, moreover, Azcona was another man. Not going out at night of course allowed him to recover from lunch and more time to write better in the mornings. For this writer, two of the best hours of quality time in his life were spent drinking dry martinis with Rafael Azcona.

He had an explosive laugh and an insistent deep line in self-deprecating humor. The supposedly most Spanish of screenwriters came across as a southern European English gentleman whose social duty at the dinner table or over drinks was to be very good value in the very English sense of the phrase – great fun. 

“What saves us from the bitterness of life and the wait for death is the possibility of laughing a bit at ourselves and our problems,” Azcona once said in one of his limited number of interviews.

Lunching with Fernando Trueba and José Luis García Sánchez, Rafael said: “We’re laughing so much that people are staring at us. Why don’t we pretend we’re working, write a screenplay to have some fun.  Do you have any ideas?” “So I told him my idea for ‘Belle ‘Epoque,’” Fernando Trueba recalls in “Imprescindles.” 

Variety chatted to Goya Award winner writer-director and novelist David Trueba (“Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed”), who came to know Azcona very well.

You got to know Azcona when you were very young….

I met him when he made his first film with my brother, Fernando, “The Year of Enlightenment,” [“El año de las luces,” (1986)] as chance would have it. I was maybe 15 and Rafael was already a legend, because people didn’t know what he looked like; his face: He didn’t give interviews or appear in the press. For film buffs or those of us who intended to make cinema, however, he was a legend. So one day I went to see my brother and there he was, Rafael Azcona, in Fernando’s study. “David, this is Rafael Azcona,’” Fernando said. And I just said: “Wow!!!”  

How did Rafael react?

I remember perfectly. Rafael said: “I’m told you want be a writer.” And I said, “Yes, screenplays and novels.” And he said: “Don’t just write screenplays. You have to direct as well. Or become a novelist. Otherwise, it’s a total frustration. I’m totally frustrated.” And I said: “You might be frustrated but for all of us, a maestro.” And he said: “I wouldn’t be too sure.” 

You became his No. 1 fan…

Yes. When “The Year of Enlightenment” opened, one of the most important reviews was generally very good but objected to Azcona’s screenplay. That now seems a little absurd but at that time, Rafael had his critics. So I set out – you know how I was at that age – to dedicate myself in body and soul to revindicate Azcona, because for me he was one of the fundamental elements of Spanish cinema in the second half of the century. And I remember when I began to write films, I named him in every single interview saying that “I might be writing better or worse but [always] worse than Azcona. The phrase but “worse than Azcona” became quite popular.

And Rafael’s reaction? 

He laughed a lot at my praise. But then he always laughed a lot. He smiled a lot. He could harp on things – but he would often burst out in laughter and make other people burst out in laughter. He was a very, very charming as a person. And I was lucky enough to get invited to have lunch with him every week, which was like my going to college.  

You directed a conversation with him, 2007’s “Rafael Azcona: Oficio de Guionista” where typically he claimed that any respect he had gained had come from longevity. You never wanted to do anything bigger?

It was a half-hour news report commissioned by Canal+ in Spain. [Journalist] Luis Alegre and I once proposed to Rafael to make a whole documentary feature in line with “La silla de Fernando,” a portrait of the great Spanish actor-director Fernando Fernán-Gómez. He loved that film but said he was very timid, would be embarrassed and Fernán Gómez as an actor had a great delivery, which he didn’t. 

And what did Rafael bring to a screenplay. He used to say that he was just a collaborator…. 

That’s very much Rafael. He understood very well that his work was collaborative, at the service of the director. He had that very clear. What interested him was a director’s imagination. But his own personality still shone through. He had such an overwhelming personality, so rich, so many anecdotes, that this would spread across the film. You just have to compare the first films of Berlanga and those he wrote with Azcona. It’s as if they’d been bathed in Kafkian darkness, far less of the Caprian humor of Berlanga’s first movies. Less Frank Capra, more Franz Kafka. 

“Belle Epoque,” however, is in many ways a luminous film, with scenes lit by the spirit of Jean Renoir…

My brother Fernando also has a large personality and connected very well with Rafael and gave him the possibility of working on a film which is more hopeful, more luminous. Other directors he wrote with in his later career, José Luis Cuerda and Jose Luis García Sánchez, were younger than him and also pushed him towards this a certain warmer-hearted glow or luminosity.

And how was Belle Epoque written?

It was written over lunches, at Casa Benigna and Pedro Muguruza’a El Frontón, by Fernando, Rafael and José Luis García Sanchez. Rafael included a lot of things but Fernando also limited a lot of others. They disagreed sometimes and Fernando steered him, but they worked very well together. But when it came to credits, since Rafael wrote the scenes and the final version, José Luis and Fernando decided they would take a credit for the story and Rafael the only credit as its screenwriter. 

And what was Rafael like?

He viewed life with a certain bitterness. The ideal ending of Rafael’s screenplays was the protagonist’s suicide which he managed to get in quite a few films. In this sense, he shared something with Kafka and Jewish Central-European humor which has a certain sense of tragedy. 

But with his friends?

With his friends, he was a great conversationalist. At lunch, or just after. He liked to eat and drink, friendship and listening to people. I remember he would always show me the bus pass he got when he was 65. He would say: “This makes me happy. You hear the best dialogues on the bus.”