Strong and Moving!

Memorable, crazy movie

I wanted to but couldn't!

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

A Spanish post-war drama directed by Jose Luis Cuerda and based on the novel of Alberto Mendez of the same title.The story is set in the Spanish city of Orense, in Northern Spain, in the 1940s, and tells the story of a family of communists struggling to survive after the victory of the fascists in 1939. The father Ricardo -played by Javier Camera- declared dead, lives hidden in the family basement with his subversive and prohibited books, and types works on his wife's behalf to earn some money. The mother, Elena -played by Maribel Verdu- lives and acts as a widow who makes ends meet by sewing and typing. Their teenage daughter Elenita and her boyfriend Lalo -played by Irene Escolar and Martin Rivas- are involved in guerrilla activities but try to escape the country, while child Lorenzo -played by Roger Princep- goes to the children school in town. There, Gonzalo gets the eye of Fr Salvador -played by Raul Arevalo- a seminarian and fascist ex-soldier who feels immediately attracted to Elena.The script is mediocre with stereotypical characters, predictable plot and events, and, most importantly, without emotion or heart. A soulless movie despite telling a story that should be moving and thought-provoking, and it ends being just pretentious. Nothing new in the exploration of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.Regarding the acting, Maribel Verdú and Javier Camera do not believe what they are playing, and their performances are mediocre, much below their acting abilities and quality. Raul Arevalo is good in his portray of the confused tempted priest. The rest of the supporting actors are OK in their roles, but child Roger Princep was awful to watch.There is nothing excellent or memorable about the film, just mediocrity. To be honest, the things I liked the most about this film were its atmosphere, the views of the Orense's city, and the title. While watching this movie I thought of a similar movie which, instead, showed all what this lacked in this - the Butterfly's Tongue.Despite the script being so poor, perhaps because the novel was not, the scriptwriters won a Goya -the Spanish Oscar- to the best script in 2008. The movie was also selected to represent the Spanish cinema in the Oscars in the same year, but did not make the final cut.

I saw this last month at the 2009 Palm Springs International Film Festival. The screenplay by the late Rafael Azcona was adapted from the widely popular Alberto Mendez novel and the setting is northern Spain in the immediate post Spanish Civil War period. Elena (Maribel Verdu) has assumed the role of head of the household as her left wing school teacher husband Ricardo (Javier Camera) is being south by the right wing government and is believed by them to have been killed but in fact he is in hiding in the house. Another left wing fugitive is Lalo (Martin Rivas) who has also been hiding in the home but now must flee to the safety of the Portugal border with his pregnant wife and daughter of Elena and Ricardo, Elenita (Irene Escolar). Elena and Ricardo's youngest child Lorenzo (Roger Princep) is enrolled in a catholic school where his teacher Salvador (Raul Arevalo) is a former military conscript who has returned to studying for the priesthood and is a part-time school teacher and sympathetic to the right wing government. He also is obsessed with the beautiful and supposedly widowed Elena and is torn between trying to win her affections or becoming a priest. From director Jose Luis Cuerda it offers nice cinematography from veteran Hans Burman and beautiful art direction from Baltasar Gallart but it's nothing more than a made for TV movie like you might find on Lifetime. I'm sure the film must have fallen far short of the novel. It comes across as forced, silly and even laughable in places where it isn't supposed to be funny. I suggest you pass on it and I would give it a 5.5 out of 10.

Once again, the postwar period is used as stage for a good movie with magnificent actors who turn it into a big one, giving life to prominent figures who fight to survive, trying to give sense to their acts, no matter what. It is true that Javier Cámara's jump turns out to be artificial, maybe because he does not spread himself in dramatic quality and goes to the practical thing, but Maribel Verdú, in her better moment of the movie, reduces the fault completely. We have an adaptation that focuses on the conflict of one of the main characters of the original tale. The totally corrupted by the war morality of the religious man (something that reminds me to the soldier men of In Elah's Valley) If they had focused, for example, on the confinement of the husband, we would have another thing, better or worse, we do not know it, but it would be already another story. By the way, the child asks this question because he does not see the suicide. Is just the woman who runs towards the room when the husband says goodbye.

This movie is based in a very famous book published in Spain with the same title. The book is really hard and very moving. I know many people who has cried reading it, and that's really complicated. The film, on the contrary, leaves apart the hardest chapters of the books and they only appeared at a tangential way. So, the story focused on the problems of a priest-soldier and practically the whole 100 minutes are about this boring character and his boring conversations. I'm really sorry about the result, because there were many great expectations about this movie in Spain. Everything is bad in the movie and reminds all the worst of Spanish Cinema. For instance, the scene when the hidden father jumped through the window to suicide is absolutely surrealistic with the boy (it is supposed he is clever) asking his mother why is she crying. "'Cause your father has killed himself! Didn't you notice?" The mother should have answered that to the boy to make the scene even more surrealistic, or just to turn it directly into a comedy. A missed opportunity to create a great movie with a great story. Just for the record, none, absolutely no one wept at the crowded press preview, not even a singe teardrop.