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The grim joke is expanded from The Trouble with Harry ("You should have thought of that before you went hunting this morning!"), for Carlos Saura nothing scratches political scars like "un día de campo." A caged ferret is the introductory image for Franco's old reactionaries on a holiday, the arena of diseased critters was once a cratered battlefield, "a good place to kill." The landowner (Ismael Merlo) hopes for a loan from the businessman (Alfredo Mayo) in between bullets and drinks, the brother-in-law (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba) tags along to embody the hope of youth, or perhaps its ignorance. The science-fiction buff (José María Prada) casts women as vampires and hungers for annihilation, the dead embezzler is one of many phantoms. Shotguns and pistols, scopes and binoculars, rock 'n' roll and martial drums: "Hey, this isn't a military operation." The terrain is rocky, shrubby, hilly, battered, and frequently viewed from above with the camera like a magnifying glass burning the insects. The tone among friends is jocular-irritable, darkening over the course of a clammy day in the face of an exhumed past, money, a runaway wife, failure, aging. Triggers get itchy. Saura's relentless exorcism of a nation's surplus machismo, erect barrels and hidden skeleton and all. The rabbit chase from La Règle du Jeu is here a holocaust, the pin-up magazine goes into the toxic fumes of an out-of-control bonfire, "just a little extra heat." A headless mannequin is the sort of symbol to turn up in this desert, the sweaty misogynist stomps around it while muttering in German and pins a beetle like a medal to its chest. Borges' "The South," a rifle finally turned against itself. "Which war?" "Any war, what's it to you?" An influence on Peckinpah (Straw Dogs) will be observed. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |