|
Surrealism and childhood, "an interminably long and sad time" mitigated by little morbid games. The tail end of the Franco dictatorship has tykes rattling inside a vacant Madrid mansion (cf. Clayton's Our Mother's House), the pivotal sequence has the 9-year-old (Ana Torrent) stumbling into the deathly aftermath of a liaison (mistress fleeing in the night, gaping corpse in bed, poisoned cup on the stand). The patriarch in military uniform (Héctor Alterio) is dutifully mourned, the well-meaning aunt (Mónica Randall) moves in, the children are unsettled ravens. "Too pale and delicate," a former piano prodigy sent to an early grave by sickness and her husband's philandering, Mom (Geraldine Chaplin) materializes as a flirtatious specter. Adult drama as fodder for playacting youngsters, grave things swirling behind the girl's huge eyes—a fascination with death in the stoic burial of a hamster or in the way her sisters (Conchita Pérez, Mayte Sanchez) are mock-executed and revived during a game of hide and seek. "Miedo a lo desconocido" and dolorous loss alongside inquisitive wonder, plus Chaplin doubled as the grown-up heroine gazing back pensively. "Why did I want to kill my father?" Carlos Saura's fiercest and most fluid film contemplates a tiny angel of destruction, the tender companion of the silent crone looking at photographs of old Spain. The poison that might just be baking soda, the boy's toy that's a real Luger, the drippy pop song that comes to embody dark enchantment itself. Wise and von Fritsch's Curse of the Cat People and Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis for the calm timbre, Mulligan's The Other for the aerial hallucination. Memories like the dreams of those who can't sleep, "nosotras estamos jugando." A new beginning is plainly stated, vacation's over, back to school. With Florinda Chico, Mirta Miller, Germán Cobos, and Josefina Díaz.
--- Fernando F. Croce |