deprisa deprisa (w&d carlos saura)

Saura’s early 80s movie has something of the trashy aesthetic that would colonise Spanish cinema with early Almodovar and the Movida Madrileña. Its Bonnie & Clyde narrative is set on the poor outskirts of Madrid, dusty tower blocks surrounded by waste land, a city starting to expand but not in any hurry. Pablo and Angela are two kids who are part of a gang which goes on a crime spree, stealing from institutions and people unprepared for their anarchic violence. All the members of the gang look more likely to be in a band than hard bitten criminals, and there are several scenes which take place, a la Scorsese, in pared-down 80s discotecas. Music is important to the group, and it is perhaps worth noting how their identity is formed in large part by Spanish, rather than Anglo-Saxon music. When the gang’s ambitions turn to the bigger fish of taking down a bank, disaster inevitably follows. But it seems clear that the director’s interest is less in the criminal elements of the movie and more in portraying a new Spanish generation, one that has become apolitical, takes drugs, doesn’t give a fuck. It feels as though it might have been influenced by Mean Streets. The stripped down, handheld aesthetic, with its washed-out colour palette and anti-heroes must have felt like a shot of pure modernity in the post-Franco era.

Nb -this IMDB note seems worth sharing: Jose Antonio Valdelomar González (Pablo) was recruited by Saura in a casting for non-professional actors. He was paid US$3,000. In 1992 he was found dead of a heroin overdose at Carabanchel prison (Madrid), where he was arrested for robbing a bank.

cria cuervos (w&d carlos saura)

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. 

la caza (w&d carlos saura, w. angelino fons)

Saura’s early film belongs to a template which was already well established (Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and has continued to thrive (Deliverance, En El Pozo). A group of men head out to the wilderness where they will come face to face with their own savagery. The four men in question are three old friends and one of of their sons, who are going into deep Spain to hunt rabbits. The tensions within the group are soon established with the usual problems of masculinity rearing their head. The hunting sequences are surprisingly brutal. It doesn’t look as though the famous card: No Animals Were Harmed in the Making of this Film could be employed here. Saura presents the hunt as raw in tooth and blood with a strikingly edited sequence that has a percussive violence. Later, another sequence where a ferret is sent down a rabbit hole to join the hunt adds a layer that is almost horror, with the terror of the rabbits captured through sound and edit. Another element that is added is that many of the rabbits are sick with myxomatosis, meaning that the very hunt is both devalued and the rabbits that are caught are diseased. At one point, one of the men, Paco, shows another his secret cave, where the skeleton of a dead soldier lurks, and earlier in the film there is a throwaway remark about how this area was a killing field in the Spanish Civil War. Which is clearly the film’s subliminal agenda. Saura wants to confront the violence that underpins Franco’s civilised Spain. He does it with an unflinching commitment to display this violence, and it is highly effective. The finale as the protagonists finally flip and take each other out, is perhaps predictable, but the bloodied image of Luis is like something straight out of a horror movie - or a civil war.