Carlos Saura, 1976
You can't say anything about this film without noting that it hinges on the performance of Ana Torrent as Ana, the young girl surrounded by death and convinced she's killed her philandering father. You may have seen Torrent in her film debut in Spirit of the Beehive, as an adult she acquit herself quite nicely in a small role as Catherine of Aragon in The Other Boylen Girl. Here, as in Beehive, she has a wonderfully grave, forthright presence; her big eyes register everything, and she so expertly underplays moments with a resolute deliberateness that you forget she can't be held accountable for her actions and that the (for us) banal adult bad behavior she witnesses actually has a traumatizing, deleterious effect on her. Until she does some little thing that makes you remember with a powerful punch. Ana watches her mother (Geraldine Chaplin) in pain and terrified of dying, and those big eyes, though they register pain, don't flinch. Later we watch her retreat and cover her ears so she can't hear her mother's cries, and it totally breaks your heart.
The film dwells liberally in the realm of the unreal. Flashbacks occur alongside fantasy sequences that we don't, at first, recognize as such. It serves as a reminder of just how inside her head this poor girl is, and the extent to which she lives among ghosts. In addition, Chaplin takes on two roles: Ana's mother and the grown-up Ana. Adult Ana's reflections -- recognizing her parents' foibles, processing her younger self's rationalizations and emotions, plays up nicely against the stark, black-and-white world of the beleaguered child.
In spite of all the sadness, Cria has a lovely, contemplative feel; we basically alternate between seeing Ana observe things and seeing the events unfold. Saura uses camera movement to take us from the vast loneliness of this universe and into Ana's interiority. He deploys the pop song "Porque Te Vas" to creepy, wistful effect.
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