Old Yorker

Víctor Erice (1983)

Now in his mid-seventies, Víctor Erice has made only three feature-length pictures – The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), El Sur (1983) and The Quince Tree Sun (1992) – but the first two of these often feature on critics’ lists of all-time great Spanish films.  I saw The Quince Tree Sun, a documentary about the artist Antonio López García, in 2003.   As Wikipedia says, it concerns López’s ‘attempt to paint the eponymous  quince tree … [he] struggles to capture a perfect, fleeting moment of beauty on canvas, and the film meticulously chronicles his work’.   It’s both a cheap shot and a fair summary of The Quince Tree Sun to compare it with watching paint dry.   But The Spirit of the Beehive is a compelling drama and so is El Sur – though it too makes for testing viewing.  It’s hypnotic in more ways than one: you are soon feeling very sleepy …  That said, the film should have been considerably longer than it actually is.  The source material is a novel by Adelaida García Morales, who worked with Erice on the screenplay.  (At the time, they were also partners in personal life.)  The producer, Elías Querejeta, ‘decided not to allow the filming of the latter 90 minutes … because he thought the 95-minute film … was sufficient for his purposes’ (Wikipedia again).

A teenage girl, Estrella (Icíar Bollaín), is woken at dawn by the sounds of a dog barking and her mother calling out a man’s name.  A voiceover narration by the adult Estrella (María Massip) explains that her father Agustín had disappeared in the night previously but that she knew this time he’d gone for good – as soon as she discovered, under her pillow, a pendant that belonged to him.  The year is 1957 and the place is northern Spain.  Estrella and her parents moved there several years ago, though Agustín (Omero Antonutti) hails from Seville, at the opposite end of the country.  His unresolved feelings about his past and the fascination with the South (‘el sur’) that this engenders in Estrella are at the heart of what follows in the film.   She recalls her life from the age of eight (the younger Estrella is played by Sonsoles Aranguren) – from when the family came to their new, rural home and her doctor father took up a post in a local hospital.  Estrella’s recollections of childhood include what she imagined about the life led by the increasingly remote Agustín in the outside world.  It transpires that he has committed suicide during the night on which the film begins.  His daughter falls ill in the wake of his death but recovers; her mother Julia (Lola Cardona) agrees to Estrella’s going to convalesce at the home of her paternal grandmother (Germaine Montero) and the grandmother’s companion Milagros (Rafaela Aparicio), who was once Agustín’s governess.  The film ends with Estrella packing her case for this visit – a journey to the South.

The pendant that Agustín left under his daughter’s pillow before his final disappearance has divining properties.  He uses it to locate an underground source of water; years earlier, he dangled the pendant over the belly of his pregnant wife in order to predict that their unborn child would be a girl.  At least, that’s what he did according to Estrella:  when this scene appears on the screen, the adult narrator acknowledges that it’s one she invented.  This is a key moment in El Sur in that it raises the possibility that anything seen subsequently might also be a product of Estrella’s imagination.  For this literal-minded viewer, that was a difficulty with the film – particularly in sequences involving Agustín but not Estrella that don’t add to his mystique or strengthen his daughter’s deep bond with, and yearning in relation to, her father.  (She has no such feelings towards her troubled, domestically bound mother.)  The sequences I have in mind don’t, in other words, amount to anything more than you’d expect – Agustín at work at the hospital, or greeting his mother and Milagros, neither of whom he’s seen for years, when they come north to attend Estrella’s first communion.  A somewhat related difficulty stems from a remark by the narrator to the effect that her memories are now flickering and fragmentary.  El Sur is remarkably beautiful but the images created by Víctor Erice and his cinematographer José Luis Alcaine don’t have an insubstantial or a fragile quality.

The young child Estrella finds the name ‘Irene Ríos’ written over and over again, in her father’s hand, on one of his notepads.    The name means nothing to her until Estrella sees it again on a film poster at the local cinema.  We see clips from the film in which Irene Ríos (Aurore Clément) is starring and in which her character dies at the hand of a man (Francisco Merino), who is apparently her lover.  Estrella also sees, at other moments, her father’s motor cycle parked outside, and Agustín emerging from, the cinema.  When, several years later, she asks her father about Irene Ríos, he says that he didn’t know her but that he did know a woman called Laura, who greatly resembled Irene.  Although the details of the father’s relationship with Irene-Laura remain unexplained, this element of El Sur feels less puzzling than its other aspects.  I think this is simply because the cinema is – in movies –  such a familiar surrogate for a character’s fantasy world.  (In this case, it could represent the fantasies of Agustín or of Estrella or of them both.)  Erice’s camera stops on a poster, outside the same cinema where the Irene Ríos movie is playing, for Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt – a film that describes the gradual, alarming destruction of a young woman’s illusions about a glamorous older male relative.  When a director introduces this kind of reference, moderately knowledgeable moviegoers feel they know (approximately) where they are.

It’s harder to grasp the significance of relatively straightforward biographical information about Agustín – even though the powerful, enduring legacies of the Spanish Civil War are also familiar, from various art forms.  We learn that Agustín fell out with his father when they supported opposing sides during the Civil War (Agustín was a republican, his father pro-Franco).  This seems to have caused Agustín’s exile from his homeland yet it doesn’t fully account for his nostalgia for the South or the transmission of that nostalgia to Estrella.  This element – even the very ending of the film, in which Estrella’s immediate future destination is her father’s past – lacks the emotional weight of both the Irene Ríos element and the suggestions in El Sur that Agustín must remove himself from Estrella’s life irrevocably because their feelings for each other are too strong.  The girl’s parents are never close – except in that pre-natal scene between them that Estrella has imagined.  The adolescent Estrella is (that is, sees herself as being) courted, even pestered, by an unseen male who goes by the name of ‘El Carioco’, who paints ‘I love you’ on the wall outside the family home, and who, when we hear a telephone conversation between him and Estrella, has the voice of an older man.

El Sur clearly doesn’t aim to be realistic in the presentation of Estrella’s home life or the people who feature in it – except for the housekeeper Casilda (Maria Caro) and, during her brief visit, the friendly and garrulous Milagros.  I felt the film was held together by its absorbing rhythm and pictorial beauty, and by the magnetic faces of Sonsoles Aranguren, Icíar Bollaín, Omero Antonutti and Lola Cardona – but I was frustrated at the end:  I didn’t get what Víctor Erice meant to convey.  Twenty-four hours on, that sense of incomprehension hasn’t gone away yet I’m already more impressed by the film – not least because it’s more present in my mind than it was a day ago (the opposite usually happens).  I don’t know what Erice felt about Elías Querejeta’s decision to pull the plug on the intended second half but it may be that El Sur is both more elliptical and more haunting as a result of its unexpected truncation.  The film is difficult to fathom – but it isn’t self-satisfied about its impenetrability (the way that movies such as Last Year at Marienbad and Hidden seem to be).

One thing easy to understand about the film, now being re-released in Britain, is its appeal to Pedro Almodóvar.  Its themes (the unknowability of other people, a child-parent bond); its tropes (the suggestive cornucopia of movies); its individual images (the blood-tie red of a ball of yarn that is wound and unwound, the pendant – described in the English subtitles as a ‘pendulum’, which may be either a simple mistranslation or a more expressive choice of word).  El Sur was among the pieces of Spanish cinema chosen by Almodóvar to accompany the recent BFI retrospective of his work.  He couldn’t have imagined the extraordinary connection between Víctor Erice’s film and his own oeuvre that occurred at the screening I went to at Curzon Bloomsbury.   After the adverts and the trailers, the certificate came up – for Julieta.  This got a decent laugh; I assumed there was nothing to worry about, remembering a false alarm at the same venue last year.   But the audience’s suspension of disbelief didn’t last beyond the production credits and the appearance of Julieta‘s opening image of undulating red fabric.  People started waving at the projectionist’s box until the youngish man next to me announced, rather smugly I thought,  ‘They don’t have projectionists nowadays’.  A couple of more helpful members of the audience then left the theatre to report what was going on.  We must have watched a good five minutes of Julieta before a member of staff put her head round the door, said ‘We’re working on it’, and disappeared.  There was no hint of an apology or of embarrassment on her part – just a sense of mild irritation with viewers pedantic enough to want to see the film they’d paid to see.

20 September 2016