Espanyol is Biutiful

Watch the new movie Biutiful by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, director of Babel and Amores Perros, described on the movie website as, ¨a love story between a father and his children. This is the journey of Uxbal, a conflicted man who struggles to reconcile fatherhood, love, spirituality, crime, guilt and mortality amidst the dangerous underworld of modern Barcelona. His livelihood is earned out of bounds, his sacrifices for his children know no bounds. Like life itself, this is a circular tale that ends where it begins. As fate encircles him and thresholds are crossed, a dim, redemptive road brightens, illuminating the inheritances bestowed from father to child, and the paternal guiding hand that navigates life’s corridors, whether bright, bad – or biutiful.¨

It´s a bleak tale for sure, but redemptive I think, and one that as a father who is of the same generation as both Bardem and Iñárritu, hits home as that last stretch before oblivion comes upon us all. As the last stretch of 2010 appears, and I am writing this from my dilapidated apartment, waiting for my wife to come home, I think about things that mean the most to me. I worry about their future, their lives if I weren´t there to take care of them, but there are things that keep me grounded, things that give me hope that the troubles we are all facing will set themselves right.

I am thankful for all my experiences, good and bad, and life is without question, biutiful, but I wonder if there is any sense to be made. Certainly this post makes little sense in the context of football, even Spanish football really, until you dig deeper and expand your perceptions. This modern tale, told in a part of Barcelona rarely seen, would not have made much sense had it been told in the context of an FC Barcelona fan, and without doubt the signs are there throughout the movie, not overt per se, but in the background, in the corner of your vision, there´s a faded poster, a forgotten flag, or a misplaced badge of RCD Espanyol.

Some might take this back-handed homage wrongly. No one wants the sort of attention in a Hollywood movie especially if the movie is a down-right bummer of a film, and certainly no one who supports the club wants to associate themselves with the image of the club as a club for the marginalized, the less-than-savory, the weak and of the losers in this world that revolves around characters like Uxbal in Biutiful, but I don´t look at it that way. We can either let ourselves be characterized or we can turn the characterization on its side. Our story is not the story of one supporter, a lowly criminal trying to find redemption before his time is up, but his story is certainly part of the fabric of all Espanyol supporters in some way or another. That someone involved in the story, whether that was in the script or in the direction, or maybe in the set design, or even in the acting, brought up the idea of using Espanyol as an image, a contextual marker for the story of this struggling family, well I say thank you.

Our club is a club for people who know that life is complicated, that we cannot win every competition and destroy every opponent. Our lives are richer. Our loves are more honest because we realize that disappointment is factored into the equation. The highs are sweeter because of the lows we have traveled. We should be thankful for it all. See the movie, know that it isn´t the best kind to take a date to, but know that a little piece of Espanyol is buried within.

Happy New Year.