Werewolf in Galicia Stories about werewolves in different provinces of Spain tell a lot. The most famous of them went far beyond the Iberian Peninsula and gained popularity on both sides of the ocean. But the romanticized image of Romasanta, ideal for commercial cinema, with the usual characters of peasant legends told to each other over a mug of cider, has little in common. Like any media character with a real person. That's why a good movie Romanasanta for glossy posters and magazine covers.
But Benito Freire performed by the wonderful Spanish actor Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez on the hero of posters does not pull. This character is not capable of causing any emotions: no admiration, no fear, no sympathy - only pity. Pity for a little man, brutally battered by life and hardship. Short, sick, lonely, he wanders from town to town, from village to village, with a huge box over his shoulders filled with various small goods. With his help, the eternal vagabond tries to earn a living by selling icons, scapularies, threads with needles, worn clothes, penny jewelry and the like to the poor. He is known everywhere, he knows everyone, but has no relatives or friends. You don’t need them because when you’re here today and there tomorrow, it’s hard to get close enough. And it is dangerous, you never know when the beast that has lived in you since childhood will release its claws.
True, this beast is as weak as Benito himself, and therefore his master prefers to feed his second self with those who obviously cannot resist: women, old people, children. Cheating the victim for the time of another seizure, the werewolf behaves cunningly and carefully, as befits a wild animal. In his human form, Freire is not too smart, not at all beautiful, but perfectly mimics among the same semi-literate peasants, rural priests and inhabitants of provincial towns.
Basque Pedro Olea carefully recreates the atmosphere of the Spanish province of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. Somewhere in the world, electricity is already in full swing and cars are driving along the roads, the Maternovo stoves are buzzing and the first samples of automatic weapons are being developed. And here everything remains the same as a hundred, two hundred, and three hundred years ago. And in order to get from one city to another along mountain paths, you need to use the services of a guide, who may not be at all what it seems. And how many of the travelers disappeared at different times on these routes - except that legends will tell.
And they are, legends, flesh of the flesh of these places and the representation of their natives about the world around them. Therefore, werewolves here are not some magical invulnerable creatures, but well-known neighbors, or even relatives. Therefore, the stories about their crimes do not carry any romantic halo, and the werewolves themselves are treated with sympathy and pity - it can happen to anyone. So these are not even legends, but everyday stories. And the fact that they feature a full moon or wolf skin is just a tribute to tradition. What are these werewolves without such attributes? They are not werewolves, but simply maniacs. And about the fact that such things happen in the world, in the remote Galician villages have not even heard.
That is why Benito Freire, who killed eleven innocent people, is considered by popular rumor not a maniac, but an unfortunate victim of a curse, whose deeds will then be reflected in table stories and songs. And those, in turn, becoming the basis of literary plots and scripts, will give rise to new myths. The ones that will feature romantically sinister Romasanta.
But Pedro Olea, all his creative life digging into the origins of folk art, reverently recreated ethnographic pictures of the past (suffice it to recall his adaptation of the Bascon tales “Akelarre” and “The Legend of the Cura from Bargota”), filmed not the novel of the Spanish writer Carlos Martinez-Barbeito, which formed the basis of the script, and even not the real case of the Spanish peddler – he filmed a myth born in the minds of the people. Therefore, the genre of his “Wolf Grove” can be defined as a folklore and ethnographic thriller, in which historical authenticity and folk poetics are much more important than suspense and the sharpness of the plot. In some ways, the creative credo of Basque was close to the representatives of Ukrainian poetic cinema. But this is, of course, the subject of a much more detailed conversation.