La cuenta
2007 · 10m · España
Directed by Pablo Sola
Genres: comedy, musical, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
Four friends cannot pay for what they have consumed in a bar, in a carefree musical short about a generation with many resources, few opportunities, an uncertain future and a lot of cheek.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A musical about broke twentysomethings dine-and-dashing their way through existential drift—it's the kind of tonal whiplash (comedy + genuine precarity) that makes people nervous, which means it's probably doing something real. Sola refuses to let the songs soften the teeth.
The conceit sits somewhere between Godard's playful Marxism and the Spanish musical tradition, though the film's commitment to tonal consistency—never choosing between satire and sympathy—keeps it from the formal rigor that would make it canonical.
The decision to make this a *musical* about economic anxiety is the hinge everything turns on; that genre choice reframes what could be mopey social commentary into something with genuine velocity and lightness, and it works because Sola trusts the form to carry the weight.