Not looking at the tittle. In a children's story
On the sadness of the passionate
History is hazy,
But grief is clear...
Antonio Machado
During the twenty-odd years of his cinematic activity, Bigas Luna made many films; and often they produced on the viewer a pronounced effect of rejection of action, reaching outright disgust, many were forced to permanently delete his name from the list of directors whose work should be paid attention. But if you are going to watch “Titka and the Moon”, then try to forget that the director of this film staged “Poodle” and “The Ages of Lulu”: this is the most gentle and lyrical of his work, fundamentally cleansed of rudeness, cruelty and frank erotic scenes. After all, he turns here to the theme of farewell to childhood, and in detail to the description of that period of life of each child, when he has to take the first step from a clear and protected space near his mother’s skirt on an incomprehensible and frightening road to adulthood.
A little bit about the name of the tape. Here, of course, Bigas Luna did not deny himself the mischievous pleasure of playing words and images. As you know, the bull bull is teased with a red cloth; in this case, the annoyed viewer is teased with this very notorious tittle. The film, to my humble understanding, is not about this part of the female body. However, criticism with particular pleasure savors exactly the “theme of boobs”, attaching to this film the label “with a tit for life”. The film is about the opposite (more below). It seems that the director got the desired effect from the title: show the fool the tit... He won't see the rest. Or better yet: Write a fool a tit... And he equates it with the affection of the director, because his name is also written in the title. In addition, the name of the protagonist - the boy Tete - the Portuguese name Tete, meaning "game of hide-and-seek", consonant with the word teta - tit (both in Spanish and Portuguese). Quite understandable symbolism: the main character “plays hide-and-seek” with growing up, and with others, observing the subject of his passion. Consonance with the “titka” once again hints at its “milk” age. Otherwise, the allegory of the name can be interpreted as follows: titka is childhood and everything that is associated with it; The moon is an adult life, clearly visible, but seemingly distant, mysterious, inaccessible and, of course, attractive.
But back to the action itself. I believe that many, having read the formal interpretation of the preamble of the film - the boy Tete, who is probably already about ten, is obsessed with the desire to find a titty who will always give him milk - will think that we will talk here about some incomprehensible deviations of the child's psyche, the director's tendency to perversions and frank outrage of the viewer. Without the latter, of course, did not do, but certainly was not the main goal of the director: in the form of a carefully thought out and brilliantly staged grotesque (in which the unprepared viewer often sees kitsch), the Moon immerses us in the world of a child standing on the threshold of his tender age. The first love, the first jealousy, the first loss of an elder comrade, the first feeling of being a man. Yes, all this is not presented in the form of a classical drama, but these are specific artistic techniques of the Moon; and it is clear that they produce an ambiguous effect on different viewers.
However, in the general framework of the narrative there is absolutely nothing unusual. The older child is often jealous of the mother for the newborn, and the responsibility for this, I believe, is primarily the parents. Falling in love with boys or vague trembling feelings for an adult woman at the beginning of puberty, which comes just about ten years old, is quite normal. A child who is absorbed in new sensations is not able to adequately perceive the age differences between him and the object of his worship; he simply does not think about such differences at all, nor is he able to understand the nature of his feelings. When I was ten or eleven years old, I had a vague attraction, bordering on love, to a friend of my mother’s (one of her age) and even once announced that when I grew up, I would marry her. It is clear that later I fell in love with a classmate. The child does not always understand the games of adults, their desire to be first in the game. Sometimes it is more important for him to have a particular prize in case of victory. But the participation of Tete in the acrobatic game of “castle”, revealed to us at the beginning and end of the film, demonstrates not so much this simple fact as it puts “border towers” on a segment of his earthly path: in the beginning of the picture he is still a child, and in the end his father says that “his son now has balls like a bull”, and Tete proudly echoes him: “before I did not have them at all, and now I have eggs like a bull.”
The disclosure of the main topic is accompanied by frank slaps in the face of philistineism. And these slaps are manifested not only in the unusual drawing of ordinary history. The "gas man, king of fire" show is only at first glance not too realistic for 20th-century Europe and too vulgar. But why do people laugh in huge concert halls, where they are amused by jokers? Yes, the same "puku" - the wind of words collected in the baby understandable allegories and vulgar hints. And just as attendees of the show in the film chew their food with appetite against the backdrop of toilet sounds from the stage, aren't many of us enthusiastically consuming our lunch while watching another bloodbath on TV? Not new, of course - bread and spectacles. And in the latter, perdoneme, again, titka is not in last place. Only when it appears on the screen not for entertainment, but to reveal the author’s view on a particular topic, there are outraged exclamations. In general, “show us tits, but without any nonsense.”
There is very little behind-the-scenes music in the film; it is concentrated in action and unobtrusively brings the viewer closer to his phantasmagoria. Is there so much phantasmagoria in what is happening on the screen? No wonder the narrative is conducted on behalf of the boy and even a not too attentive viewer can notice an exclusively childish, emphatically unrealistic interpretation of individual events. The director in a grotesque form reminds us of the existing social paradox: the chasm between the world of childhood and the world of adults and the often arising childhood fear and suffering on the way to inevitably overcome this boundary. And even parents sometimes do not see what is happening in the soul of the child and first check his teeth, although the source of pain is not in any particular part of the body. We are willing to believe a superhero, catching a bullet with his teeth or climbing out of a precipice on one finger with a beautiful lady in the other hand, but we treat with a grin the fantasies and sorrows of a child; we, once also became adults.