Aquel ritmillo
1995 · 15m · España
Directed by Javier Fesser
Genres: biography, comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, whimsical
An old man in a nursing home looks back on his youthful years, when he had a singular sense of rhythm and a special intuition that led him to become chief detective-inspector of the Casa de Electrodomésticos Prim appliance company.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A detective-inspector of *appliances*—Fesser takes the biopic, that most bloated and reverent of forms, and deflates it into absurdist memory-play with a straight face. The premise is so deliberately indefensible it loops back into something genuinely moving.
Fesser's formal control here—the way nostalgia and mundanity interweave through a carefully constructed framing device—situates itself within a European lineage of elegiac, deadpan comedy that values restraint over sentiment.
The film's entire architecture hinges on a single decision: treating the protagonist's rhythm-instinct as genuine, never winking at the audience; that commitment to the central conceit, played with absolute conviction, is what elevates what could be mere whimsy into something strange and real.