Winning Streak (Los Pelayos)
(Spain, 101 min.)
Dir. Eduard Cortés, Writ. Eduard Cortés, Piti Español
Starring: Daniel Brühl, Lluís Homar,
Eduardo Fernández, Shi Chi Chui, Vicent Romero, Oriol
Villa, Miguel Ángel Silvestre.
What are the odds of beating the house during a night at the
casino? They’re pretty slim, eh? Anyone who has spent a night piddling away
their quarters knows there is a point at which the house will take your
winnings if you aren’t smart enough to walk away. The odds vary by game. Slots
last for about twenty dollars’ worth of quarters, but yield little returns.
Card games vary the most, as they seem to require the most strategy. That dice
game is a crapshoot. Roulette, finally, seems impossible to beat because it is
essentially a lottery game with a spinner and a little white ball.
Gonzalo can’t actually be in on the action himself. A
lifelong rounder, Gonzalo has been caught scoping out the casino and has earned
the distrust of the casino’s foreman, nicknamed The Beast (Eduardo Fernández, Biutiful). Although there essentially is
nothing illegal about Gonzalo’s plan, he avoids the casino because he doesn’t
want the wrath of The Beast to interrupt his family’s winning streak.
Winning Streak is an
entertaining, anti-heist heist film. In the vein of Ocean’s Eleven, or more likely 21,
Winning Streak is a stylish affair
about friends working to win big and beat the bad guy. The Beast is a
cartoonish presence, but not quite on the level of, say, Don Pickles as the Pit
Boss in Casino.
The film also has a subplot about Iván’s struggle with his
own beast, his father. Continually toyed and strung along by Gonzalo’s ambition
to topple The Beast, Iván has put much of his own life on the back burner to
help his father achieve his goals. This thread, unfortunately, doesn’t really
escalate beyond a mere romantic triangle with Iván’s girlfriend/horny Asian
stereotype (Shi Chi Chui). Brühl and Homar give admirable performances
nevertheless, so fans that first saw them in the films of Tarantino and
Almodóvar probably won’t be disappointed.
Brühl and Homar’s work is worth noting since they manage to
draw out characters that don’t seem to be part of the film’s thin script. Winning Streak never really finds the
deeper meaning behind this true story – it’s essentially a film about winning
through legitimate means. The gist of the story amounts to “man picks numbers,
man buys lottery ticket, man wins.” Winning
Streak is a fun little caper all the same, slight as it may be. Winning Streak probably won’t break the
bank, but it should at least break even.
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Winning Streak
screened in the Canadian Film Institute’s European Union Film
Festival.
