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The opening shot, the girl's darkened room leisurely coming to life at the crack of dawn (creeping sunlight, barking dog, some random commotion faintly heard beyond the frame), is a wondrous display of Vermeer gradations that establishes what follows as a memory-projection "directed" by the young protagonist. ("A very vivid image that in reality I made up myself.") Spain in the 1950s is a house divided, not just along Civil War lines but between the family's northern rural manor and the mythical south of Seville, movies and other El Dorados. Estrella the celestial beholder, as a child (Sonsoles Aranguren) and a teenager (Icíar Bollaín) trying to make sense of the chiaroscuro world around her: "I grew up more or less like everyone else, getting used to being alone and not thinking too much about happiness." The father (Omero Antonutti) is a fellow withdrawn dreamer, adored and disturbed and lost in a reverie of his own, enthralled by the movie diva (Aurore Clément) who once flickered onscreen at the local theater. Victor Erice envisioned a lengthier treatment and got the Stroheim treatment, the half that remains is exquisitely tender and lucid about childhood's shifting emotional spaces. As in Spirit of the Beehive, cinema sculpts identity—following the Frankenstein monster of emerging perceptions, a melancholy web of dislocated doubles and paradises lost, glowing with enchantment yet also aware of the need to question that enchantment. (Another tale of idols with feet of clay, a certain La Sombra de una Duda, is advertised at the Cine Arcadia.) The sensory side of remembrance, a whiff of spearmint, the tapping of a cane on a wooden floor, the sweep of a paso doble. "Practically miracles," from a whispering, truly calligraphic camera. Cinematography by José Luis Alcaine. With Lola Cardona, Rafaela Aparicio, Francisco Merino, and Maria Caro.
--- Fernando F. Croce |