The reception of a work of art is a curious, contingent process. In January, we went to the Louvre, where the Mona Lisa lurks. However, in order to see her, you need to queue in a room crammed with tourists pointing their phones at the old lady, in a scenario that feels more like queueing to board a plane than waiting to see one of the western world’s most celebrated artworks. We didn’t join the queue and as a result my reception of Da Vinci’s painting is nothing like what it might have been had I had the chance to contemplate her in my own time.
I only say this in relation to Saura’s film because it took me almost an hour to enter into a state of mind where I could start to access it. Maybe it was a far more contemplative film than I was in the mood for, or expected, or maybe I struggled to engage with the material, which is a memoir a young girl’s youth. Maybe I wanted to see more of Madrid, a city I am fond of, when almost the entirety of the film occurs inside an old house, which the occasional wide allows us to see, lurks hidden in a changing barrio of that city.
Then, and this is surely to the film’s credit, at a certain point, I began to enter into its Bergmanesque rhythms and became utterly seduced by them. In large part because it is such an understated narrative. The film is a poignant, beautiful portrait of youth, with its tedium and fantasy and deceptions. Ana, who tells the story of her mother’s betrayal by her father and early death (and who is played as an older woman by Geraldine Chaplin, who also plays her mother, in a touch that is reminiscent of Sciamma’s Petite Maman), is a child whose love of life is entwined with her unhappiness, who has learnt too much too young, for whom the past will always hang heavy over her shoulder, like a character from a Marias novel or anyone who grew up under the Franco dictatorship. Without doing very much, Saura’s film does an awful lot. Its power creeps up on the viewer, just as the shadow of the past creeps up on us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment