Garbanzos
2001 · 19m · España
Directed by Manu Fernández
Tones: darkly comic, theatrical
Six work friends meet to eat at a restaurant; the menu is chickpeas. What could have been a relaxed meal becomes an airing of each one's dirty laundry.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A one-joke premise that could've been a SNL sketch, except Fernández actually trusts it enough to let the thing *breathe* — six people circling a chickpea menu like it's Beckett, which is either profound or insufferable, and I genuinely can't decide, which means it's probably worth seeing.
Fernández understands the geometry of social comedy: constraint breeds revelation, and a menu of only chickpeas becomes the formal scaffold for a perfectly calibrated excavation of intimacy and resentment among peers — the theatrical restraint here recalls the drawing-room tradition while staying firmly contemporary.
The single choice that makes this work is the decision to play it *straight*: no winking at the absurdity, no mugging, just six actors committing to chickpeas as the honest subject, which transforms what could be a gimmick into genuine emotional exposure with almost no budget for anything but script and performance.