Any dramatic comedy that features the supremely improbable character of a drug-dealing grandmother has no right to feel as endearing and sincere as Tapas, the directing debut of José Corbacho and Juan Cruz. The Spanish duo shared this year’s Best New Director Goya for their well-observed and low-key effort that follows various characters while they struggle with life and death, love and marriage and kung fu and cooking in a popular Barcelona neighbourhood.

The grandmother is known as Mrs Conchi (María Galiana, from Solas), and she works out of the local bar run by Lolo (Ángel de Andrés, 800 balas), who, unaware of her shady dealings, thinks she is some kind of geriatric rock star, if the number of youngsters who come to chat with her every day are anything to go by. At home Mrs Conchi has to take care of her terminally ill husband (Alberto de Mendoza), who believes there might be a quicker way out of life than being slowly consumed by cancer.

Lolo has his own problems: his unsatisfied restaurant cook and wife (in that order) has vanished by her own doing, and Opo (Darío Paso, from the first Torrente) and César (Rubén Ochandiano, Descongélate!), two young customers at his bar, are busy organising a birthday party which will include a dinner for 25 at Lolo’s – which will be a tough feat to pull off when the cook seems to have given up on the owner's marriage and left. A 26th guest may come in the form of Raquel (Elvira Mínguez), a 40-year-old divorced grocer who has let her eye fall on the young César, the son of one of her customers.   

Writer-directors Cruz and Corbacho set up their characters properly and lay out their dilemmas concisely without overdoing the explanations, thus avoiding slipping into melodrama. There are plenty of gentle chuckles to be had (though no laugh-out-loud moments), and the way in which cinematographer Guillermo Granillo films the proceedings in a grainy yellow-greenish murk at times makes it feel like a Spanish comedic variety of the DOGME manifesto. It also shares with the film-making purism of the Danes its raw emotional honesty that is far removed from the pumped-up emotionalism of most daytime soaps and Spanish melodramas. Even the more outlandish ticks of these characters never feel like a complete reach; they may be absurd but they never feel fake.

Raquel especially stands out as a particularly human character, which is interesting when you consider how little the audience knows about her: she has been divorced for two years, lives alone, has no other real friends except an internet pal in Argentina and, according to her loyal female customers is both better and worse off than them: she has all the advantages of being single, and all the disadvantages of not being married.

According to Opo, she must be desperate for sex after a two-year drought, and surely César has barely entered her flat for a dinner-date or they make out. What is surprising is how Cruz and Corbacho’s script and Mínguez’s strong acting help us to quickly overcome the ideas we would normally associate with such a woman: that of a sad-sacked, sex-craving madwoman who is no longer beautiful and for whom emotions and desires are a thing of the past. Fortunately, Raquel and the other inhabitants of her neighbourgood are the quite the opposite in the small and gentle wonder that is Tapas.

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