120 min | NR | August 26, 2022 | Cohen Media Group
A factory owner who hands out hugs and homilies needs everything perfect for an industrial excellence award. A fired worker camps outside his gates with a megaphone, and a new intern catches his eye. Julio Blanco will fix all of it, and every fix makes him worse.
Julio Blanco owns a factory that manufactures industrial scales. He calls his workers family. He tells them to balance their lives the way his scales balance weight. A committee is about to visit and decide whether his company wins a regional award for excellence, so Blanco needs the week to go smoothly. The film is about a man who confuses controlling people with caring for them, and it watches him do whatever it takes to keep the scale tipped his way.
Javier Bardem plays Blanco as a man who has never once doubted that he is the hero of his own story. He smiles constantly. He lowers his voice and leans in close when he wants something, and Bardem makes that intimacy feel like a threat. Manolo Solo plays Miralles, the production manager whose marriage is collapsing while Blanco demands he focus on the award. Óscar de la Fuente plays José, the fired worker who plants himself outside the gates and refuses to leave. Almudena Amor plays Liliana, the intern Blanco pursues while pretending it is mentorship, and she keeps the character ahead of him at every turn.
Fernando León de Aranoa writes and directs with a structure built on the metaphor in the title. The scale shows up in the logo, on the gates, in Blanco’s speeches, and the film keeps returning to images of things out of balance. The camera stays patient and lets Bardem hold a frame while a lie settles across his face. The score uses bright, almost cheerful cues that mock the chaos Blanco creates. León de Aranoa cuts between Blanco’s public warmth and his private maneuvering so that the gap between the two becomes the joke.
This is a sharp portrait of how the powerful launder self-interest as generosity. Blanco never sees himself as the villain because he has built a vocabulary that makes every selfish act sound like loyalty. The film stacks his small corruptions until they collapse on each other, and Bardem keeps him likable enough that the audience understands why everyone lets him get away with it. The result is a precise comedy about a man who believes the scale balances only when he is the one holding the thumb on it.