What would the servants think if they saw this? In the mature work of Carlos Saura, from the films of the late 60s-70s to the recent film “I, Don Juan”, the action is determined not even by the theme of theatricality, but by the philosophy of creativity developed under the influence of the 60s hepping, which is represented by such films as “Partner” Bertolucci or “Marat / Garden” by Peter Brook. The director follows how everyday life is permeated by the element of improvisational theatricality, becomes a performance, which in turn affects everyday life, grotesquely reflecting it and revealing its secrets. This is the plot of the films Nora, Garden of Earthly Delights, Ana and Wolves, Eyes Closed. Later, Saura’s everyday life (about the staging of which the director will also remind the viewer) will be embodied under the influence of the same theatricality in dance and pantomime ("Witch love, Carmen), in opera ("I, Don Juan).
The production of a play, dramatic or musical, is a form in which the director comprehends the relations between people in the conditions of profane or blocked communication, the “inability to dialogue”, which he found and finds in modern life. This is also the theme of the relationship between a man and a woman, when a woman plays along with a man or vice versa (as in Nora), a man begins to play along with a woman, curtaining windows, as if manipulating a theatrical curtain. For Saura, already, this is a statement about himself, about the attitude of the director to the actress, to Geraldine Chaplin, which was his constant prima. The philosophy of Saura is not reduced to a simple repetition of Wilde’s “Give a man a mask and he will tell the truth”, in his films of the 60s and 70s Saura warns that “life imitates art”, if you add one Wilde aphorism to another, and, more precisely, life under the influence of art is capable of unpredictable and fatal changes. But, despite the fatality, the heroes of Saura choose the path of theatricalization and acting out being.
Why? Because the whole world is theater? Here it is possible to compare Saura’s works with the experiments of the French “new wave” – with Godard’s “Woman is a Woman” or Rivette’s “Out 1: Noli me tangere”. It is game behavior (and ultimately its fixation – cinema) contributes to the movement of life itself (and not only its completion in the aesthetic), since it goes back to its origins – to its enrichment in ritual and carnival celebration.
This is certainly true for Saura. However, it should be noted that Saura is a director of nuances. In Nora, Ana and Wolves, The Garden of Earthly Delights and other films before the fall of the Francoist regime, Saura not only wants to talk indirectly and about indirect communication, he is forced. These are films about the underside of Spain’s economic success under the rule of conservatives with a generalissimo at the head. The plant is shown in passing in Nora, as in the Garden of Earthly Delights. “Homeland, family, work” is written on the coins of the Vichy regime, and Franco probably agreed with such a replacement for “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.” But the factory at Saura is not a place of productive labor, it is a place where men are realized in a serious life, devoid of beauty and the Spanish quality that gave the name to the Swedish actress - garbo, aristocratic grace. The reincarnations in Nora begin with the appearance of antique furniture belonging to Teresa, the heroine of Geraldine Chaplin. Ergonomic, post-constructivist interiors and the similar appearance (disgusting) of the villas where Teresa and Pedro live are contrasted with this antique beauty, this ancient garbo, as the era of the industrial-financial bourgeoisie and its morality is opposed to aristocratic times with their elegant leisure. Teresa uses the delivery of furniture to delve into the childhood memories that she and Pedro play with her: a daughter and father, a girl and her playmate Robert, participants in a children's religious performance. The roles of maids, mistresses and dogs are being tried on, and finally, can we play a divorce? The seemingly happy couple break up before our eyes, unleashing hidden hatred, and this is exactly the moment in which the philosophy of Saura is fully realized: is it a game in which Geraldine Chaplin and Per Oskarsson are busy in front of the camera, do their characters Teres and Pedro really intend to part? We have already been given to understand (a scene with a tub filled with crayfish) that the boundaries of the supposed “reality” are shaky, and the fantastic freely mixes with the everyday, as if real.
About the film of Saura, the director of nuances, we can say a lot more (about cultural allusions, about names - it is no coincidence that the character of Per Oskarsson is called the Hispanic name of the actor himself), but we would have to sum up. Labor turns out to be joyless and immersed in the ugliness, material well-being of Teresa in the family - her mortal boredom in the conditions of a conservative and prim “homeland”, where a woman obeyed first her father and then her husband, and then the generalissimo receives a sharp blow with a mop on the front portrait. But they say the Generalissimo loved the movie.
8 out of 10