The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Cria Cuervos (1976/Spain/dir. Carlos Saura) appeared at #90 on my original list.
What it is • Ten spots down the line (La Vieja Memoria appeared at #100) we have another Spanish film from the seventies, exploring "that old memory" of the Spanish Civil War. But whereas the post-Franco documentary could openly address the conflict and the subsequent forty-year repression, Carlos Saura's simultaneously lucid and dreamlike fiction film is more cryptic, allusive rather than allegorical. Ana (Ana Torrent, in one of the greatest child performances of all time) is an orphan, along with her two sisters - yet she appears more haunted, particularly by the loss of her mother (Geraldine Chaplin), than her siblings perhaps because she witnessed her mother's suffering more closely. Then again, the sensitivity probably stretches further back - at one point, the family maid (Florinda Chico) reveals that Ana clung to her unnamed parent even in the womb, and the doctors had to use forceps to deliver her. The little girl continues to commune with her mother via a mix of fantasy and memory, delivered in the same limpid, straightforward key as the rest of the film. Ana's affection does not extend to her late father, whom she (perhaps mistakenly) believes she has poisoned as revenge for her mother's sadness, illness, and death. Nor does it extend to her aunt Paulina (Monica Randall), whose well-intentioned but grating discipline and attempts at affection she spurns. Just as Spain was preparing to shake off the Franco regime (the dictator himself was dying as the film was shot) and undergo an uncertain transition into a centrist democracy, Ana and her sisters struggle against increasingly desperate discipline, both cherish and fear their increasing freedom and aimlessness, and inquire curiously about their family history. And at film's end they prepare to enter the wider world, less nostalgic and romantic, but also less morbid and melancholy.
Why I like it •
