Un millón en la basura El remake
2016 · 2m · España
Directed by Jeromín Cantero
Tones: contemplative, humorous
Pepe, a grey and humble street sweeper, one day finds a million in a rubbish bin and decides to keep it to solve his pressing economic problems, in a remake of the José María Forqué classic.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A remake of a 1950s Spanish comedy about a street sweeper finding a million—sure, it's got the bones of subversion (remaking Forqué?), but the execution feels like it's genuinely *earnest* about the class commentary, which either makes it brilliant or toothless, and I can't quite tell which.
Cantero's engagement with Forqué's formal legacy—stripping the premise down to two minutes, keeping the ethical ambiguity intact—reads as a considered essay on adaptation and what survives the remake; the contemplativeness cutting against the comedy suggests a filmmaker aware of what he's inheriting and what he's interrogating.
The real move here is the tonal balance: letting Pepe's humility stay *actual* humility rather than playing it for laughs or melodrama, which in a 2-minute frame means one or two precise moments of restraint that reframe the whole moral question of the find.