’Marco’: San Sebastián Review

Dir: Jon Garano, Aitor Arregi. Spain. 2024. 101mins

Most Spaniards will be familiar with the story of Enric Marco, an alleged concentration camp survivor who became president of a Spanish association of deportees before being revealed as an impostor. This remarkable Holocaust-victim appropriation tale has already spawned a documentary and a ‘non-fiction novel’ by Javier Cercas. Although it flirts with the meta-fictional layers of what is essentially a story about a man who scripted his own life, directing duo Jon Garano and Aitor Arregi’s latest feature is at heart an old-school character-based drama that racks up the strain and suspense of living with such a whopping lie while teasing the obvious question: why would anyone do that?

The enigma of Marco before, during and after his unmasking is its number one preoccupation

It’s to the credit of an otherwise rather predictable, chronological script that we never really find out. Marco provides none of the backstory explanations of a classic con-man movie like Catch Me If You Can. This is a tale about a man whose lie is already well-polished when we meet him, a man so embedded in the legend he has made up for himself that he is shocked when others question it, as if a well-crafted, oft-repeated story somehow merited automatic promotion into the realm of truth. The impressively internalised performance of veteran Spanish actor Eduard Fernandez as Marco, whose home-dyed hair and moustache become an objective correlative of his fakery, is matched by Nathalie Poza’s affecting turn as his devoted wife of many years – perhaps the only one who sees beyond the fabulist to the man inside.

The old-fashioned values like the great cast, fine ageing work by the make-up department, lush photography that risks a little handheld edginess at moments of crisis, and a well-matched, tension-raising soundtrack by Aranzazu Calleja are the film’s main calling cards. After its Venice debut, where it screened in the Orizzonti sidebar, Marco, The Invented Truth will close the San Sebastian film festival, and it’s the perfect, well-crafted prestige local product for the task – especially given that the film must be one of the favourites in the race for Spain’s 2025 Best International Feature nomination. Outside of Spain and Spanish-speaking territories, the film will need to rely not on cast recognition or collective memory but on the strength and impact of its hard-to-believe story, which will most likely appeal to older audiences in the mood for a good (subtitled) yarn.

Introductory texts inform viewers that around 9,000 Spaniards were interned in German concentration camps during the Second World War, and many died there. The vast majority were Republicans who had fled to France after the Spanish Civil War and were captured, often while fighting with the French army. After the war, Franco’s regime, which had almost certainly colluded in their internment, never acknowledged the survivors. They simply airbrushed the episode out of history – and it was partly thanks to Marco, a man who said he was imprisoned in Flossenburg, that democratic Spain of the post-Franco era started to rectify that wrong.

One of the more extraordinary true-life episodes in the film is Marco’s impassioned address to the Spanish parliament on Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005, on behalf of the Spanish camp survivors association he then presided over. The bare facts of Marco’s story are full of such screenwriter’s gifts, and the four-hander script makes the most of them – especially in a segment set during an official trip to the Mauthausen-Gusen camp on the anniversary of its liberation, just when Marco’s unmasking at the hands of a Spanish historian was about to be made public. 

Marco is good on how a twinkle-eyed grandfather with a talent for self-promotion and a flair for sentimental rhetoric needs no other qualifications to be feted by politicians or the media. But outside of its nuanced exploration of the relationship between Marco and his wife, which plays deftly with our uncertainty about how much she knew, the script is hesitant to address questions such as whether it’s possible that Marco (who visited schools and gave lectures about the Holocaust) may have used a lie to speak the truth.

In his book on the affair, Javier Cercas maintained that Marco succeeded at least in part because he peddled ‘historical kitsch’, survivor stories with a whiff of a boy’s adventure comic. He was too articulate, where real survivors of the camps were often, understandably, reluctant to open up. The film nods briefly in this direction – but the enigma of Marco before, during and after his unmasking is its number one preoccupation.