“What I wanted was to be an Argentine actor,” Luis Brandoni repeated every time he was reminded of the most famous phrase that came out of his mouth. The “three empanadas” scene It had been written as another script for “Waiting for the Float.” But when words have spark, they catch on quickly. In a matter of hours it began to enter the popular language and, with the torrent that the decades gave it, it crossed the border between analog and digital. The three empanadas were viral before virality and are part of the cultural legacy left by Brandoni, who died this Sunday at the age of 86.
Antonio Musicardi was one of the four brothers who became involved in that family boarding school behind the elderly Mama Cora. The story – a play by the Romanian-Uruguayan Jacobo Langsner brought to the screen by Alejandro Doria – came packaged with apparent customs, but with acid layers of grotesque and a share of reality that transcended generations: hypocrisy, advantage, cynicism, class imposture. There were repressed elements of every Argentine family in the Musicardi family.
That atmosphere is what develops in the scene of the three empanadas. “It’s all the hand of the author,” Brandoni said one of the many times he spoke about those two minutes that, in their own way, became eternal. The scene was filmed “near Liniers,” as the actor recalled. In reality, the filming took place in Villa Lugano, in a neighborhood of low houses and monoblocks on Piedra Buena Avenue.
With his brother Sergio (Juan Manuel Tenuta), Antonio – “a supernatural scoundrel” – had arrived there looking for Mama Cora, whom they could not find anywhere. They wanted to know if he was at the house of Emilia (Lidia Catalano), the Musicardi sister with the worst economic situation. The entrance to the neighborhood already leaves a phrase for posterity. “There you have the idiot,” Brandoni dedicates to Cacho, the teenager played by Darío Grandinetti with a Boca shirt, Maradona curls and a finger on his nose.
But what matters here is the exit, which occurs two scenes later. Brandoni goes down the stairs of one of the gray, cement-colored monoblocks. He comes in a suit and white shoes, chewing and with an empanada in his hand. He gets in from the driver’s side to his Mazda RX-7 sports carimported from Japan. Tenuta gets in on the passenger side.
-What misery, man. What misery. Do you know what they had to eat?
-Three. They broke my soul. Three empanadas left over from yesterday for two people -he says while holding up three fingers and taking another bite. My God, how little can be done for people.
The scene continues with a discussion with Sergio that reveals the social and economic conflict. “You have a dignified poverty,” Antonio (Brandoni) spits between his mustaches, with his mouth full.
But what remained were the three empanadas, a “very painful expression.”
The revelation in a Boedo cinema
There was no calculation or improvisation. “It was written,” Brandoni recalled, 40 years later, in all the interviews they did with him about the enduring success of “Waiting for the Carriage.”
The exact moment in which Brandoni decides to go look for Mama Cora at Emilia’s house, in Lugano. “It’s a phrase that no one laughed at when we filmed it, no one noticed,” he pointed to the social background. “The guy says ‘three empanadas left over from the previous day, how sad,'” and he was eating one. You can’t be more scoundrel than that. Argentines find it funny and feel represented by a scoundrel. My character couldn’t be more scoundrel. They are our sociological characteristics,” he interpreted the success of the phrase.
“We did it without thinking about the significance it would bring. It is truly tremendous, cynical. But we lived the filming of the film with joy,” Brandoni continued.
Despite the naturalness with which it was lived on the streets of Lugano, the popular success of those two minutes did not take long to reveal itself. The film was released on May 6, 1985. The first Saturday, Brandoni, Doria and producer Diana Frey toured several neighborhoods to find out how the film was doing. They went to Boedo Avenue at 800, where the “Boedo cinema” was (today a supermarket).
“The ushers were outside, waiting for the movie to end. We asked if we could come in. ‘Yes, yes, come in, come in,’ they told us,” Brandoni said. “I walk to the room and I hear one of them say ’empanadas’. I turn around and said ‘how, what’. ‘Empanadas’, he repeated. ‘I don’t understand you, what do you mean’. And he tells me ‘The empanadas’. That’s when I found out that something was happening with that.”
The sticker at the end that few remember
Over time, the actor revealed that the empanadas were meat. And he also stopped at the end of the scene, with a detail that – he said – had gone unnoticed.
“The ending is not funny. It’s an ending that very few remembera shot from behind the car where they are and there is a criticism behind that scene, a criticism of how we are,” he said.
The ending that Brandoni was talking about is the closure of the brothers’ argument inside the Mazda: when Sergio says, angrily, that his sister Emilia lives in misery, Antonio answers which is “a worthy misery.”
While he gestures with his hand (and continues eating the empanada), the camera cuts to a frontal shot and a change of focus reveal a sticker on the rear window of the car: the Argentine flag and the phrase “You have the right to live in freedom.” It is the same pamphlet as in 1982 the dictatorship had been distributed in the Malvinas -with which, on the other hand, Antonio, a financier by profession, seemed to be linked according to allusions throughout the film.
“Misery is not worthy, it is a misfortune that falls on a family or a group of people. Giving dignity to poverty is too cynical,” Brandoni interpreted the comments his character made as he progressed with his snack.
Luis Brandoni and the end of his scene remembered with the phrase about the “three empanadas” in Waiting for the Carriage.In the last years of his life, with celebrations (even a tour that visited the filming locations), re-releases and re-readings in theater and cinema, the actor explained what feelings the fanaticism of the “carroceros” aroused in him.
Although he joked that he had done much more in his career than the “three empanadas”, he was already clear about what had happened. The key, he explained, was “having hit upon a different, new expression, which the Buenos Aires people and generally the Argentines have made their own.”
“I am flattered to have played many Argentines in that character, in a true way, that they believe it,” he said in retrospect. “I feel proud. What I wanted was to be an Argentine actor, and that reaffirms my condition as an Argentine,” completed the also protagonist of other iconic phrases as “They inflated the hype” and “They filled the kitchen with smoke” to refer to her daughter’s pregnancy in the film “One Hundred Times I Don’t Debit”, a character played by Andrea del Boca.
