145: Cria Cuervos (a.k.a. Cria!)

Something that has always fascinated me about directors, particularly world cinema directors, is that so many of them choose to tell at least one of their stories through the perspective of children.  Malle, Fellini, and Truffaut all made some of their best films about children.  Steven Spielberg was once dismissed as a children’s picture director because of E.T. (1982), but now that film seems to have been a point of departure in his anthology of work.  In any case, I find it interesting that so many filmmakers are compelled to project their vision of the often confusing world through the eyes of children.  Carlos Saura attempted to do just that with his Cria Cuervos (1975).

            To play his young protagonist Ana, Saura chose Ana Torrent, fresh off of her performance from Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973; #168).  While this film is not as good as that one, Torrent’s performance here is almost as enchanting.  The film begins as she descends the stairs of her large home in urban Madrid while a woman quickly exits the bedroom of her widowed father.  The father lies dead in bed, and Ana takes it upon herself to wash out a glass of milk sitting on the nightstand.  Later we learn that she believes that she has poisoned her father and was attempting to dispose of the evidence, though it’s clear to the audience that he died of a heart attack.  What makes this situation even odder is that one actress, Geraldine Chaplin, plays both the dead mother who scolds Ana (in a sort of dreamlike hallucination/flashback) and the adult Ana reflecting on the events and narrating her emotions. 

            Both of these characters add a strange sense of omnipotence to the film; one that transcends time and perspective.  The film takes place in the present of 1975, but features the adult Ana of the future reflecting on the events which unfold.  Conversely, the deceased mother and subsequently the now dead father appear throughout in these dreamlike memories which Ana holds of her parents.  Her mother seems to offer her both council and comfort but does not appear to have found peace in the afterlife.  Ana often descends the stairs to find her waiting up for her father who in death seems to come home late as often as he did in life.  Much time could be spent attempting to dissect these scenes, determining which elements are memories and which aspects are fragments of imagination, but such efforts would be pointless.  Dreams don’t work that way.  They are scrambled segments of our consciousness which include both the developments of the past and our hopes and fears of the future.  Ana observes most of these projections stoically, unable to affect her own dreams.

            When her overwhelmed aunt comes in to take care of Ana and her two sisters, she is unprepared for the task.  The three girls aren’t bad children, but a dead mother and a neglectful father have left them unmannered.  While her older and younger sisters seem to react to this change of authority gracefully, Ana is still attached to her mother and resistant to the new rules.  She is caught between being too young to understand, like her younger sister, and old enough to accept the adjustment, as her older sister is.  She seems to be disbelieved by everyone, dismissed as having an active imagination.  Her dreams about her mother seem so real to her, but everyone else is so tired of hearing about them that when she tells them of her father’s affair with his best friend’s wife (the woman from the film’s opening), she is scolded for making up stories.

            This is not a film about truth so much as it is a film about confusion; about a time in life when the world seems so big and scary a place that the only relief from it comes by holing up in your room to listen to records.  It’s fitting that so often cinematographer Teodoro Escamilla shoots the exterior of Ana’s large home from above, highlighting its place amongst the busy streets.  The walls of the villa protect Ana and her sisters from the world outside and the urban soundscape that plays so heavily on the audio track.  Thus it’s fitting that the final shot of the film show them finally walking out onto those boulevards, back to school from their lengthy vacation. 

            The film’s odd title comes from a Spanish saying – “Raise raven and they’ll pluck out your eyes.”  It speaks both to the inevitable nature of life dealing out comeuppances, and to the naughty nature of Ana and her sisters at the film’s outset.  They are not bad children – after all, Ana makes a strong case for why she intended to poison her father – but they are the result of what neglect can do at this fragile age.  As a film about that age, and about the how confusing adults seem at that time, this picture succeeds, however overall it falls short of being any sort of masterpiece.  It has been read as an indictment of Franco’s Spain and the nature of rebellious feelings under his dictatorship.  I’m not a cultural historian so I’ll make no such connection or comment thereon accept to say that the theory is interesting.

Grade: 2 Hats Off