Elisa, Vida Mía (Spain, 1977):

Carlos Saura himself sliced his oeuvre not so much into pre- and post-Franco as into pre- and post-Elisa, Vida Mía periods, and this intimate drama indeed makes, along with Cría Cuervos, the director's mid-'70s apogee of psychological penetrations of the Spanish consciousness. Elisa (Geraldine Chaplin) comes to celebrate her estranged father's (Fernando Rey) birthday on his Segovian cottage, and decides to stick around for a bit to get reacquainted with pop as well as lick her wounds from an imploding marriage. While the various relationships of the new generation undergo breakdown, the old man luxuriates in a kind of rebellious serenity. Or does he? If the synopsis suggests snug intergenerational regeneration following the death of Franco, Saura kills any easy comfort by tricking out the narrative with even more disquieting dreams, fantasies and digressions than his earlier allegories. From the beginning, with Rey's voice narrating his daughter's words, the movie sets out to tease a series of evocative trap doors -- a chandelier remembered during a shaking childhood earthquake, a decomposing corpse locked up in an apartment, a gory stabbing alternating between reverie, memory and fantasy. For Saura, Spain's future following decades of oppression depends on the crystallization of a sense of identity, focusing once again on a woman trying to bridge a troubled past and a shaky present. By taking over Rey's creative reins (directing a school play, finishing his memoirs), Chaplin finds a new direction in life -- and thus points toward a new cultural order -- through the subversion of the father figure. Cinematography by Teodoro Escamilla. With Isabel Mestres, Joaquín Hinojosa, Norman Briski, and, briefly, Ana Torrent.

--- Fernando F. Croce

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