La leyenda negra...

Rating: 9/10 (22 December 2006)

Well, I didn't give it a score of 10, after all, I need to build-in some reserve for a yet better film... I went to see this film together with my wife and youngest son of 18. We were all, including my thumb-twitching gaming video-freak son, extremely impressed by this movie. For myself, it's the best "Spanish" film I've ever seen (and that includes "Volver"). Any one considering seeing this "fantasy" story with young children should firmly and forever ban such thought from her/his mind: the fantasy portion acts to augment, to provide "volume" to the sheer horror, the fairy-tale serves to further develop the story of the actual, hyper-realistic, and unspeakably brutal real-life events the adult actors in this drama are consciously experiencing. A reviewer on this forum has written that Spain was, in 1944, at war. It was -technically- not. The civil war had ended back in 1939, Spain had been "liberated" in it's entirety, and the army was only kept mopping-up "communist and anarchist" resistance in the mountains... In fact, the result of the Franco's liberation is clear for all to see in this film, which portrays the mentality of the Franco regime's "liberators" as realistically as any I've read in a number of serious historical works, Franco biographies and novels treating the subject. Absolutely chilling, this civil war and the first decade thereafter, brutal terror, murder, hunger. The fact that this young girl would -superficially- appear to belong to the elite (sorry that car was a Rolls-Royce and not an Hispano-Suiza, as would have been far more correct in Spain) did not take away the incredibly uncomfortable situation she was in: her father dead, and her mother involved with this all too believable Falangist type (in fact so typical for the nineteen-thirties in Europe). The "spirit of the age", the Fascism, the shadow of the war, all these things a young girl cannot comprehend other than in terms of a fantasy story hinting of how this -good- kid might, somehow, avert the overpowering forces of doom, of disaster which she experiences and senses all around her. And she fails, too. The only "happy ending" that could possible be construed is that, in physically dying, she rejoins her dead father and mother... This film joins Spanish history and literature in unveiling the dark side of Spain, the side not associated with fiestas, allegría and tapas. Wonderful, great film. But I'm not a poet, and that dark side is all too overwhelming, sad and worrying. Sergi Lopez has, once again, demonstrated that he is the greatest living "French" actor (he's very active in French cinema),and the fact that he is Spanish is so very, very ironic...