Older walkers for Fernand Gomez An indirect, indirect statement is both the plot and theme of many of Carlos Saura’s films. His formula "life - spectacle (performance or dance) - life" stands as follows: life, mediated by its theatricalization, transformation into a spectacle, into an aesthetic fact of play, reveals its secrets and not only gains the opposite effect on the spectacle, but can deal a fatal blow to those who dare to play with it. However, in this game, life is not emasculated to aesthetic refinement, it is enriched by the elements of celebration, ritual, carnival. Dionysian element, which can be dangerous or salvific.
In part, this poetics was the Aesop language of the director in the era of Frankism. But the generalissimo died, and the Baroque style of playing with reflections remained the organizing principle in Saura’s films: it is no coincidence that Professor Angel in the Hoduly, the character of Fernando Fernando Gomez, is a specialist in medieval theater (allegorical) and baroque poetry. In such a game, reflections of the macrocosm are sometimes reduced to allegorical detail. The box of ants in Nora shows Per Oskarsson’s character the horror of a life focused on working for food (comfort, luxury) and reproduction. Unlike a real anthill, this box is a toy and has no way out, it is a “nora” in which apparently prosperous spouses are locked. In "Khodulya" such an allegorical detail - stilts themselves. They make a person of everyday life an actor standing above her and playing a play. Having started writing a play for street actors on stilts, Angel is already rising above the ground, finding himself on a motorcycle for the first time - however, in the back seat. But he can't get on stilts.
In his films of the 80s and 90s, Carlos Saura moved away from the poetics of the parable, in which the central image - the ant hole, the fountains of the Aranjuez palace as the embodiment of fountains from Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights", which gave the film its name, or blindfolds - becomes the key to all the rich semantics, opening the connection between the many scattered hints. The melodrama came to the fore. And although the spectacle – a farce on stilts – is indicated by the very title of the film, and retains its significance as a plot turning block, the staging of the performance is no longer the theme of this film, not the semantic form through which the director learns the world of human relations. Love, recollection, aging, death – simple melodramatic themes began to be presented directly. This was a decline in the work of the director, the impoverishment of the semantic plan, as well as the visual plan. That marvellous moment in Saura’s earlier films, as well as in the later I Don Juan, when the viewer can’t decide whether the actors are playing everything in that implied “reality,” or whether it’s playing in a game, theater in a movie, or fantasy, hallucination, delusion – in films like Walking, Shoot!, Bird, and Taxi – has been lost. But lost temporarily.