The dinner

 

“It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
— Mark Twain 

The central insight of A cena con il dittatore is disarmingly simple: if you put together a handful of obtuse officials and a group of chefs eager to escape, you don’t get a state banquet. You get a comedy. 

The men of the regime form a catalogue of criminal mediocrity in uniform. They speak in slogans, think in conditioned reflexes, and above all, understand absolutely nothing. They make up for it with granite-like confidence—which is, after all, the purest form of ignorance. The more the situation slips out of control, the more rigid their tone becomes, as if shouting “order!” were enough to run a kitchen—or a country. 

Meanwhile, in the background, the real spectacle unfolds. 

The imprisoned chefs are neither saints nor heroes: they are intelligent people in the wrong place, facing foolish men convinced they are exactly where they belong. This is where the film becomes irresistible. Every gesture is double: to cook and to survive, to obey and to evade, to serve and to resist. Their rebellion is devoid of rhetoric—it is made of glances, small deceptions, quick decisions. A resistance that does not speak: it chops, stirs, and waits for the right moment. 

The kitchen backstage is pure organized chaos. Boiling pots, contradictory orders, officers barging in to give instructions without being able to tell a ladle from a weapon. Up close, the machinery of power looks less like a system and more like a farce: everyone gives orders, no one knows what is happening. 

A small slapstick inferno. Francoist power reveals itself for what it is: an inefficient machine sustained by an excess of rhetoric and chronic incompetence. The more officials try to control every detail, the more the system jams. It is the bureaucracy of the absurd. 

And upstairs? Upstairs, nothingness is celebrated with great solemnity. 

The figure of Francisco Franco hovers like an administrative deity: distant, untouchable, and above all surrounded by a humanity that worships him with the devotion of those who have stopped thinking. His acolytes are devoted to the point of ridicule—a devotion born not of faith, but of the fear of being excluded from the banquet (in a very literal sense): living caricatures, trapped between fanaticism and mediocrity. 

“Power is not a means; it is an end.”
— George Orwell 

Homophobia, predatory masculinity, nationalist rhetoric: everything emerges not as a coherent ideology, but as a repertoire of tics. 

“Fascism wants to take Madrid: Madrid will be the tomb of fascism”—so proclaim the slogans of the resistance. And while some believe Francoism will eradicate poverty, a sharper voice replies: “the rich would not know how to live in a country without the poor.” 

The film constantly plays on this contrast: on one side, the vertical obtuseness of power; on the other, the horizontal intelligence of those trying to get by. And, surprisingly, it is precisely the prisoners—the “enemies”—who appear the freest. Not because they truly are, but because they harbor no illusions. They know exactly where they are, and this makes them dangerously lucid. 

And then there is the music. A programmed joy, almost mandatory. A choreography of obedience, where even rhythm seems imposed from above. Between patriotic marches and sudden exotic detours like El Manisero, the atmosphere is that of a party gone wrong. People play and sing as if at a funeral where no one wants to admit the corpse is in the room. 

In the end, the true target of the satire is not only the dictator. It is the system that makes him possible: a network of individuals who, out of fear or convenience, would rather be ridiculous than risk being free. 

As in the caustic and irresistibly mocking El Conde by Pablo Larraín, here too dictatorship is dismantled not through the solemnity of drama, but through the far sharper weapon of ridicule: power deflates, disguises itself, trips over its own feet. The tone deliberately slips from tragic to comic, as if history, tired of being taken seriously, finally chose to tell itself as a dark joke. 

The result is a parody that does not lighten but strikes deeper: the drama warps, twists, becomes a lucid farce, and in that crooked laughter finds a truth more ferocious than any realistic reconstruction. And just when everything seems to have exhausted its delirium, a final twist arrives that does more than surprise—it reframes the entire game, as if the film, with perfect cruelty, decided to have the last laugh. 

Between a sauce, a cake, and a dose of chloroform, an improvised escape plan takes shape, and with it a strangely tender truth emerges: even at the heart of a dictatorship, someone still finds a way to think, to laugh—and, if necessary, to outwit the system with a kitchen knife. 

Intelligence applied to survival becomes a small revolution. 

“It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”
— Voltaire