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• Title: Why Spaniards Make Good Bad Guys: Sergi Lopez and the Persistence of the Black Legend in Contemporary European Cinema.
• Author : Film Criticism
• Release Date : January 22, 2005
• Genre: Performing Arts,Books,Arts & Entertainment,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 229 KB

Description

Since beginning his film career in the early 1990s, the Catalan actor Sergi Lopez has appeared in thirty-four films produced in Spain, France, and Great Britain. Described by one critic as "a burly Spaniard whose soft, open features are equally suited to expressing nice-guy innocence and sociopathic malice" (Flint), Lopez's versatility as an actor is reflected in the great variety of roles he has played--lover, friend, father, and, most successfully, villain. The present study seeks to analyze the structural importance of Lopez's star persona as it is employed in two recent European films released widely in Europe and the United States: the German director Dominik Moll's French production of Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien (2000) and the English director Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (2002). In these films, Sergi Lopez's persona has crystallized around his ability to portray the charming but sinister Spaniard. In Harry, Lopez plays Harry Ballestero, a long-lost high school buddy who undertakes to make his friend's writing career easier by getting rid of inconvenient family members and acquaintances, while in Dirty Pretty Things, his first English-language role, Lopez plays Sneaky, the aptly named dealer in an underground market in human organs. In recent years Lopez has received some of his most favorable reviews for films in which he plays the villain--he has played characters of dubious moral fiber in at least six films produced in France and Spain--but what makes his appearance in Harry and Dirty Pretty Things remarkable is that both Moll and Frears draw deliberate attention to his characters' Spanishness at key moments in their films. The following discussion of these films will be twofold. First, I will offer a brief synthesis of some of the roots and ramifications of cultural prejudice as it has manifested itself over several centuries of European cultural production. In particular, I offer a brief introduction to the Black Legend, which David J. Weber defines as the "inherited... view that Spaniards were unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, cowardly, corrupt, decadent, indolent, and authoritarian" (qtd. in Griffin 105). Second, I shall analyze Harry and Dirty Pretty Things in terms of these films' noteworthy focalizations on the Spanish-ness of the villain, played in both cases by Sergi Lopez. By looking at the production and articulation of Lopez's star persona, I hope to clarify how Lopez has embedded himself "in the imaginary and real social construct that is Spain and the world's view of Spain" (Perriam 10), and how the Black Legend continues to perpetuate itself in contemporary European cinema.

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