I had found Saura's last film, TANGO, trite and insulting, but I decided to give him another chance, in deference to his reputation. I needn't have bothered. Whatever his talent as a chronicler of character under oppression, he has no ability to film dance. He has no faith in dance's own expressive tropes, so he must impose meaning on them. He films in a flat, leaden style, which never allows the dance to come to life.
Like TANGO, Saura foregrounds a self-reflexivity on the film. This time, however, it is used relatively intelligently. There is a pretence of documentary as we watch 'famed' choreographer Antonio Gades prepare for his flamenco adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding. We see the preparations of the dancers, the (tedious) warm ups, the donning of costumes.
None of this is gratuitous (although the lingering on the undressing female dancers might be), and is infinitely preferable to the fictional ponderings of TANGO. The opening credits roll over a sepia photograph of the cast, mimicking the period in which the play was set. Lorca was, of course, a famous leftist, murdered by Fascists in the Civil War, and this is a film, made only a few years after Franco's death, that attempts to come to terms with Spanish history. The lengthy process of rehearsal emphasises the process of becoming, suggesting that history is not the monolithic entity the Right would like it to be, but a fluid interpretive searching, grasping, for the truth. The repeated gazing into mirrors links this national quest with an examination of the self. And yet Old Spain is not so quickly vanquished - one dancer hangs religious pictures on her mirror.
So, the dance is made to carry a lot of baggage. We are not given the actual performance, but a dress rehearsal, continuing the idea of becoming, as if to offer a fixed definitive version would be to concede to the enemy. This austere restriction to one bare space, without sets, without any help from Saura, means that the dancing has to be spectacular for the film to succeed. It is not, being rather conservative, and blindingly obvious and literal, the dance equivalent of dialogue sung in a Lloyd-Webber musical. Every gesture is laboriously spelt out; the viewer is credited with no intelligence.
It is totally inadequate to the play's politics, and the pared down approach means we lose its febrile, exhilirating excess. The critique of machismo and the death wish, applied to Spanish culture as a whole, is still there, but the climactic stand-off, while comparitively inventive, is more silly than cathartic, like Cavalliera Rusticana with the sound down. It is odd that a film so critical of the macho ethic should be so...macho.
As with TANGO, any effect the film has lies in the music, which, especially in the mariachi wedding sequence, provides the drama and beauty absent from the filming itself.
