40 a que no
1999 · 14m · España
Directed by Asier Altuna, Telmo Esnal
Tones: darkly comic, humorous
In an ox-pulling contest, the favourite pair of oxen unexpectedly loses, to the indignation of those who bet on them, until a neighbour discovers the plan hatched by the oxen's owner.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1999 Basque comedy that turns a rural ox-pulling contest into a vehicle for small-town corruption and animal complicity—the premise alone is gloriously sideways, and the fact that the oxen themselves are the architects of the con is exactly the kind of narrative inversion that makes people uncomfortable in the best way.
Altuna and Esnal craft a formally disciplined rural comedy that sits comfortably within the tradition of European village-cinema satire, where social hierarchies and provincial pride become the real subject; the construction is tight and the tonal control evident in how they modulate between farce and genuine stakes.
The masterstroke here is the decision to let the conspiracy unfold through a *neighbour's* discovery rather than direct revelation—that structural choice, forcing us to piece together the con alongside an outsider, transforms what could be a simple punchline into something with real narrative architecture on a modest budget.