The dramatic crux of Enemigos (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is a sort of thought experiment: Given the opportunity to exact revenge on the main antagonist in your life, would you take it? Writer/director David Valero – co-scripting with Alfonso Almador – puts the question in the hands of a teenage boy-slash-almost-a-man from a working-class family in Alicante, Spain, who routinely faces adversity in the form of a serial bully. What spins out of this Spanish film is some straightforward drama underscored by a bit of philosophical wrestling – and here’s why it’s ultimately a winner.
The Gist: Chimo (Christian Checa) just got a gorgeous, brand-new moped for his 18th birthday, and it comes wrapped in dread. He’s been working delivering meals on his bicycle and stocking shelves at a grocery store to pay for it, and his mother Carmen (Estefania de los Santos) just covered the rest as a gift. Just prior to this, we watched Chimo compare himself to the Roadrunner in the cartoons, racing his bike through the streets and sidewalks of Alicante, trying to escape from Rubio (Hugo Welzel), who’s been tormenting him for years, cornering him, beating him up, stealing his money – “the usual,” as Rubio cruelly puts it. Chimo’s an easy target. He walks with a permanent limp, a prosthetic insert in his shoe to compensate for it. Sometimes he almost fights back, but mostly Chimo freezes up in Rubio’s presence, and the creep’s goon friends get their shots in too.
So we can just picture Rubio salivating at the sight of Chimo on that slick yellow moped. Sure enough, on the same night Chimo is on a date with a beautiful girl who seems very much into him, Rubio and his cretins corner them in the parking lot. Both of them get slapped around and threatened and cursed at and Chimo hands over the keys. It’s humiliating and painful and hard for us to watch – and to make it even more frustrating, Chimo refuses to report the theft. His mother weeps, his sister Lola (Luna Pamies) is furious at him for not doing anything, his dementia-stricken grandfather (Jose Maria Peinado) just sits at the table mostly quiet. Bullying isn’t just physical for Chimo, but a form of psychological torture. His antagonists posted a video of his humiliation online, and Chimo watches it over and over. He falls into a funk, then pulls himself out of it. He goes back to work. Starts working out at the boxing gym. Thinks about the future, how he and his mother should open up a shop to sell her extraordinary churros. She’d bake, he’d deliver. The girl moved on, but otherwise, he’s feeling a little better about himself.
Weeks, maybe months, go by. One of Chimo’s daily tasks is to drop off his grandfather at the hospital for outpatient physical therapy. He’s about to leave when he hears commotion from a nearby room. The voice sounds familiar. He peers in, and there’s Rubio on the table, cursing out his physical therapist. The kid with the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on his knuckles who used to call Chimo a “cripple” for his limp – well, he crashed that stolen moped. The spinal injury left him a quadriplegic. Rubio greets Chimo with a litany of profanity and insults. The ordeal seemed to have further hardened him; humility just ain’t happening. But the power dynamic has obviously shifted. Will Chimo do anything with it? Yes: He finds out where Rubio lives, enters the apartment, finds Rubio lying on the bed helpless – and talks to him. Chimo firmly asks for an apology and is met with a verbal tirade, not that such things are effective anymore. The blustery facade will need to be chipped away before Chimo exposes his tormentor’s humanity, if there’s anything left of it. Which of course we know there is.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Enemigos brings to mind The Education of Charlie Banks (directed by Fred Durst!), and may make for a thoughtful double-feature with 2011 documentary Bully.
Performance Worth Watching: Playing a character who tends to be meek and quiet, Checa is uniformly strong in the lead, communicating his character’s emotional processing mostly without words.
Memorable Dialogue: Chimo’s mother gives him some simple, beautiful advice: “The brave one is the one who can do something, but doesn’t.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: The other bit of wisdom Chimo’s mother shares is that you only have enemies if you choose to see them as such. Enemigos builds on those two simple, but effective ideas, Valero choosing to simplify a potentially thorny and tangled premise into a clear, concise and thoroughly involving narrative. It’s a smart move for his first solo directorial effort, which benefits from excellent casting, a vivid sense of place (he evocatively captures the densely populated streets of middle- and lower-class Alicante) and tonal consistency, maintaining mediumweight earnest drama with the occasional spike of intensity. I’ve seen too many directorial debuts that try so hard to buck the norm or buckle under the weight of unwieldy thematic ambitions, and Valero wisely sticks to the basics of urban drama, putting focus on character development within the confines of a couple of core ideas.
This isn’t to say Enemigos is a predictable drama. The quiet genius of the premise is how we place ourselves in Chimo’s shoes and ponder what we’d do in the situation, what actions would be idealistic, realistic or self-destructive. We’re drawn in, intrigued by the decisions Chimo makes, and how those decisions shape the plot. Valero and Almador’s screenplay explores what kind of people homes with and without love produce, a broadstroked set of assertions that hammer the point home with a degree of obviousness, and lead to a conclusion that’s maybe a touch too tidy and artificial to be fully plausible. I didn’t always buy its dramatic developments. But when the rubber meets the road, this finely executed film is an absorbing and gently provocative story shot through with a potent line of hope.
Our Call: Enemigos is a thoughtful, reasonably authentic and intelligent drama about how difficult it can be to take the moral high ground. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.