He did not register under his real name. This is what Enric Marco says at the beginning of the film, during a visit to Flossënburg concentration camp in which he was allegedly held prisoner. You need the official document certifying your status as a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. In the next sequence, which takes place years later, the character mocks life is beautiful because of its “manipulative and sickening” character which “plays with the feelings of the deportees”.
The next cut brings us to his speech in Parliamentdeceiving all of Spain with a hoax which, as if it were a performancemaintained throughout a long life, even under the evidence of unmasking by the historian Benito Bermejo (Chani Martin). The meeting they will have at the end is not so much a climax as the certificate of an impossibility: that of understanding the reasons why he persisted in his monumental disappointment (of the family, of the whole world, of himself -even), almost to his grave.
The authors of the film, Aitor Arregi (Oñate, 1977) and Jon Garaño (Ergobia, 1974), are the first to flee this explanatory need, they do not even feel tempted beyond a flashback to the subject’s “anarchist” youth, to the genesis of his fabrication. They also fled this impossibility Santiago Fillol And Lucas Verlan when they filmed the real character in Ich bin Enric Marco (2009), precisely when he visits the Flossënburg countryside with his wife.
The premiere of the documentary is opportunely integrated into this fiction which, in a final poster, is in turn integrated into the rewriting of the invented story, by admitting that the film itself “I tried to be true to realitybut it was inevitable to fall into manufacturing.
Especially from the equator, once the fraud explodedthe organic hybridization of archive television images with the staging reaches its specular splendor in the presentation of Javier Cercas’ book on the character and himself (The imposter2014), where Marco himself appears by surprise.
The dramatic solvency of the authors of The infinite trench (2019) favors narrative fluidity over the aesthetic or poetic imprint of previous works, such as Loreak (2014) and Handia (2017).
They are aware of having in their hands a story nourished by the very fable essence of cinema in a continuous and twisted game of fiction-reality mirrors (The film opens with the clap which gives way to fiction) and above all the absolute dedication of an acting animal who, visibly fascinated by the mysterious character he embodies (who in turn plays a fable), accomplishes an enormous job.
A story that draws on the mythical essence of cinema in a twisted fiction-reality mirror game.
At one point, Marco looks in the mirror, dyes his mustache, and even though the world he invented is collapsing around him, we feel in his eyes that nothing is going to stop you performancethat their act is almost an act of Dadaist faith: denial by the system. We will not know his motivations, but he deceives us with his determination.
The heart of the drama (which can even be considered a comedy about the limits of lying) focuses on the year 2005, in the crucial weeks around commemorations of the liberation of Mauthausenwhere Marco had to speak on behalf of survivors from all over Europe and in the presence of the President of the Government.
The Spanish deportees then symbolized everything that Zapatero’s policy of “historical memory” wanted to convey. In the era of fake newsthis story does not fail to ironically represent the “Invented memory”one who believes in the belief of self-deception to deceive everyone. His shameful moral transgression was also, in its way, an anticipation of the fragile and incoherent world that awaited us.
