Fresh experiences The arrival of the boy Manuel on a visit to relatives is used by the director to penetrate into a large family, so that by the efforts of a curious child, incited by the tricks of his groovy cousin, stick his nose into his own business and hang out under the feet of adults, listening to the explanations of the girlfriend or, opening his mouth, delve into the behavior of relatives experiencing the tragedies of love and romantic madness, discovering the caches of secrets and secret judgments that push the child’s ideas about the essence of familiar and not quite ordinary things.
A long plot with a typical set of moderately extravagant personalities, not burdened with verbal tension, far from criminal secrets and terrible secrets, is based on Saura’s persistent desire to create allegorical parallels between events and their visual presentation on the screen, such as a hat blown away by the wind, turned here by the director as a sign of a departed soul.
However, with all the openness of the director’s language, there is no desire to divide it completely, it would seem, good intentions, straying into the unimaginable vanity of the master, practicing in the arts of visual speech, “talking” all nascent themes, leaving only the only working bunch of a grandson and a half-witted old man (self-sufficient Francisco Rabal), between which there is an elusively subtle contact, transmitting from one to another the wisdom of hidden experience, which is confused somewhere in more often delusional words, for the sake of which Saur obviously, his cool thinking.