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Two Spanish Directors on Criterion: Luis Bu?uel and Carlos Saura
The Stop Smiling DVD Review
(Criterion)
Monday, September 10, 2007
Cría Cuervos...
Directed by Carlos Saura
(Criterion)
The Milky Way
Directed by Luis Buñuel
(Criterion)
Reviewed by José Teodoro
“No tengo sueño,” Ana (Ana Torrent) tells her mother (Geraldine Chaplin) more than once during Carlos Saura’s haunting 1976 film Cría Cuervos…. And perhaps this eight-year-old girl’s declarations of sleeplessness are at the heart of the film’s hypnotic mysteries. Saura’s camera is so rigorously aligned with Ana’s introspective view that the story flows entirely with her experience of a world of housebound women, guns and ghosts.
The film opens with Ana wandering her family’s vast and gloomy Madrid house at night, immediately establishing her role as principal voyeur. She bears witness to the simultaneous orgasm and death rattle of her military father (his mistress subsequently flees the scene). Having already lost her beloved mother, she now believes herself responsible for her father’s death, and therefore the cause of her own orphaning. Her childhood — in the company of two sisters, a knowing housekeeper, a near-catatonic grandmother and an aunt ill-disposed toward impromptu parenting—will be informed at every turn by her fractured understanding of death and her own complicity.
The unusual shape and tone of Cría Cuervos… finds its axis in the moments when Saura’s camera pans away from the child Ana to encounter the adult Ana commenting on the memories displayed. These meta sequences help ground the story while also contributing to our disorientation: the adult Ana is played by Chaplin as well, and her phantom-like presence causes us to wonder if the mother’s remembered face is a projection of the adult Ana or if the adult Ana has grown into the manifestation of the mother, whose life was cut tragically short by unhappiness and repression. The entire film operates in this blurred frontier between memory, fantasy and reality.
Cría Cuervos… was in production as Franco (so crisply embodied in Ana’s father) lay dying. It’s been proposed that the restrictive conditions of life under Franco’s dictatorship somehow brought out the best in Saura, and one can certainly argue that Saura’s subsequent work, which started to make a habit of looking backwards, suffered from having too few limitations. But for Cría Cuervos…, this notion feels reductive, especially given the film’s debt to Saura’s collaborators: Chaplin, who was Saura’s lover, muse and co-financier; producer Elías Querejeta, who helped groom Saura’s career toward such prestige that the censors let the film pass; and, of course, Torrent, who, in keeping with her unforgettable debut in 1973’s Spirit of the Beehive, provides the film with its enduringly compelling core. (How Torrent grew into an apparently healthy adult after having her consciousness be so overwhelmed by the morbid imaginings of adult men at such a young age is a wonder.) To an unusual degree, Cría Cuervos… seems to be one of those films whose excellence is linked to numerous elements, both political and artistic, merging together at just the right moment.
Saura’s rare affinity for both the Spanish psyche and Freudian subtleties has always been his link to the country’s other cinematic master, Luis Buñuel, and Criterion’s release of Cría Cuervos… in the same month as Buñuel’s 1969 film The Milky Way constitute a heady double feature. Yet while Saura’s film is remarkably accessible despite its elusiveness, The Milky Way is probably Buñuel’s most impenetrable work. It’s consistent with his lifelong preoccupations and rife with startlingly beautiful images and tremendous wit. But it’s also flagrantly indifferent to audience familiarity with its obscure subject matter.
As much a comic essay as a work of fiction, the picaresque Milky Way follows a two Parisian tramps on a pilgrimage to Spain’s Santiago de Compostella. En route, the pair encounter others whose journeys traverse not only geography but also time—including The Virgin Mary, a fetching Whore of Babylon, and Jesus, who provides the film’s memorable final statement. What links these episodes is an ongoing discussion, pursued by a variety of disparate characters, regarding theological interpretation, miracles, dogma, and especially heresy. The constant referencing to religious history at times yields a tasty dose of enigma, but just as often feels perversely alienating.
While there are several overt gags at the expense of the Catholic Church, some complained that Buñuel had gone soft on the institution he’d always been so venomous towards, since The Milky Way seems to champion certain figures driven by faith. Yet, as with 1958’s Nazarín, the religious themes of The Milky Way are perfectly in keeping with fundamental Surrealist principles: what could be more Surrealist than characters succumbing to irrational, blind faith in an ideology riddled with contradictions? “A religion without mystery is no religion at all,” says one of The Milky Way’s pilgrims. It’s precisely the mysteries of faith that kept Buñuel returning to the subject throughout his long career, and it’s what will hopefully keep more persistent film-lovers returning to The Milky Way for years to come.
