My first teacher... Unlike the vast majority of pop artists who came to the cinema after achieving success and popularity, the Spanish singer Ana Belén was never afraid of complex, and sometimes contrarian roles, starring in directors who were difficult to suspect of sympathy for the “light”, “entertainment” genre. Hardly Gonzalo Suarez with Eloé de la Iglesia invited the actress for the main roles only because she was a famous and beloved singer. Moreover, Ana did not have to sing in most of her films, but she once happened to play a woman who, out of a sense of contradiction and protest, falls in love with... a dog.
And even though the debut film Belen, in which she starred as a fourteen-year-old girl, was just a musical comedy that became an excellent launch pad for Ana’s pop career, in the future she preferred to play completely different roles. Such, for example, as the role of a young teacher Aurora, who came to a small provincial town to bring the light of education to the local children. And since the most advanced and democratic ideas wandered in the head of the girls, she began her teaching with a lesson in sexual education, which in the Spanish outback of Franco’s time was probably not the most prudent thing.
However, the film Jaime de Armignan did not shoot at all about what the younger generation should or should not know, and he did not intend to wedge into the eternal dispute between liberals and conservatives - he simply told a touching story of first love. He said - and Ana Belen helped young Jaime Gamboa brilliantly play her. So brilliant that a year later, the actor again found himself in a similar role - this time in a duet with the then equally young Victoria Abril, who successfully crushed her partner with charisma, which she still did not know how to use in those years. As a result, Gamboa did not enter the same river twice, Paco Lara Polop’s film “Obsession” failed, and the career of the young actor ended on takeoff.
But neither Ana Belém nor Jaime de Armignan were involved. Because "Captain Brando's Love" so carefully and purely transfers the very first feeling to the screen that leaves no ambiguities, as well as no reservations. This film plays on some hidden strings of the soul - just as the best such films play, from Amarkord to One Hundred Days After Childhood. Here comedy is closely intertwined with tragedy, but laughter is good and misfortune will be endured. There are no negative characters, although there are unseemly and sometimes cruel acts. Here on the screen live, not play, and therefore there are no perfect heroes for whom there is no sense to worry.
Aurora, with her revolutionary ideas, is not appropriate in a quiet provincial town, but she almost immediately falls in love with all of its children. Adults are not up to her at first. Everyone has their own concerns, especially since these adults are mainly women, for whose husbands there is no work in the remote province, and they travel throughout Spain. Or even further, like Juan’s father, whom the boy saw only in the photo: a handsome Frenchman once made his mother happy with his son, and now only occasionally sends letters that the woman carefully locks in a desk drawer. Growing up without a father, Juan imagines himself a hero of Westerns and in the image of Aurora comes up with a lady who needs to be protected from villains. And the villain, in the person of old man Fernando, who returned from exile, did not keep himself waiting. A young teacher is drawn to an eccentric and unusual person by the standards of a quiet town, and this awakens in the heart of Juan hitherto unknown to him jealousy. What love is without jealousy!
But the love triangle that arose in the space of the film does not exist on its own. It develops against the background of events that are both dramatic and comic. Aurora’s suspension from teaching at the request of parents who began to suspect that the girl was teaching their children something wrong, becomes a reason for a childish rebellion. He, however, is brutally suppressed by one phrase resourceful alkalda, who declared a week of vacation. The whirlwind includes a lot of funny and sad scenes that allow you to create a whole series of bright miniatures of wonderful actors: Fernando Fernand Vasquez, Amparo Soler Leal and, of course, the Queen of the episode of Spanish cinema Maria Jesus (Chus) Lampreava, who shone later in the films of Almodovar. Her alkaldiha, unabashedly hugging seeds in the midst of the climax, is simply impossible to forget.
From this series of images, framing and highlighting the pair of main characters, the mosaic of the film is gradually formed, which does not allow you to take your eyes off the screen for a minute. Otherwise, it seems that you will miss something important, something that will not give the full picture. And a teenager in love with a teacher, although he is the center of attraction in this canvas, but without the details, the portrait of Juan and Aurora would be far from complete. And, of course, without the colors that Ana Belén brought here: for all her enthusiasm, with an idealistic perception of the world, the absence of life experience, her heroine manages to walk along a sharp blade, not pushing away the teenager in love with her, but also not allowing his feeling to cross the border of platonic. However, being in the place of Juan in front of a much more sophisticated Fernando in life, Aurora herself turns into a girl unable to think rationally. Ana Belén actually plays two different heroines in the same character, but does so convincingly that no split occurs. And this becomes one of the main reasons that “Captain Brando’s Love” leaves such a deep impression.
Excellent acting ensemble and careful attitude to the story, which in unskillful hands could turn the film into a scandalous movie, allow you to put the picture of Jaime de Armignan on a par with the best tapes about first love. And, of course, regret that it has not yet been translated into Russian.