If Saura hadn't done anything like this before, Iberia would be a milestone. Now it still deserves inclusion to honor a great director and a great cinematic conservator of Spanish culture, but he has done a lot like this before, and though we can applaud the riches he has given us, we have to pick and choose favorites and high points among similar films which include Blood Wedding (1981), Carmen (1983), El Amore Brujo (1986), Sevillanas (1992), Salomé (2002) and Tango (1998). I would choose Saura's 1995 Flamenco as his most unique and potent cultural document, next to which Iberia pales.
Iberia is conceived as a series of interpretations of the music of Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz (1860-1909) and in particular his "Iberia" suite for piano. Isaac Albéniz was a great contributor to the externalization of Spanish musical culture -- its re-formatting for a non-Spanish audience. He moved to France in his early thirties and was influenced by French composers. His "Iberia" suite is an imaginative synthesis of Spanish folk music with the styles of Liszt, Dukas and d'Indy. He traveled around performing his compositions, which are a kind of beautiful standardization of Spanish rhythms and melodies, not as homogenized as Ravel's Bolero but moving in that direction. Naturally, the Spanish have repossessed Albéniz, and in Iberia, the performers reinterpret his compositions in terms of various more ethnic and regional dances and styles. But the source is a tamed and diluted form of Spanish musical and dance culture compared to the echt Spanishness of pure flamenco. Flamenco, coming out of the region of Andalusia, is a deeply felt amalgam of gitane, Hispano-Arabic, and Jewish cultures. Iberia simply is the peninsula comprising Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar; the very concept is more diluted.
Saura's Flamenco is an unstoppably intense ethnic mix of music, singing, dancing and that peacock manner of noble preening that is the essence of Spanish style, the way a man and a woman carries himself or herself with pride verging on arrogance and elegance and panache -- even bullfights and the moves of the torero are full of it -- in a series of electric sequences without introduction or conclusion; they just are. Saura always emphasized the staginess of his collaborations with choreographer Antonio Gades and other artists. In his 1995 Flamenco he dropped any pretense of a story and simply has singers, musicians, and dancers move on and off a big sound stage with nice lighting and screens, flats, and mirrors arranged by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, another of the Spanish filmmaker's important collaborators. The beginnings and endings of sequences in Flamenco are often rough, but atmospheric, marked only by the rumble and rustle of shuffling feet and a mixture of voices. Sometimes the film keeps feeding when a performance is over and you see the dancer bend over, sigh, or laugh; or somebody just unexpectedly says something. In Flamenco more than any of Saura's other musical films it's the rapt, intense interaction of singers and dancers and rhythmically clapping participant observers shouting impulsive olé's that is the "story" and creates the magic. Because Saura has truly made magic, and perhaps best so when he dropped any sort of conventional story.
Iberia is in a similar style to some of Saura's purest musical films: no narration, no dialogue, only brief titles to indicate the type of song or the region, beginning with a pianist playing Albeniz's music and gradually moving to a series of dance sequences and a little singing. In flamenco music, the fundamental element is the unaccompanied voice, and that voice is the most unmistakable and unique contribution to world music. It relates to other songs in other ethnicities, but nothing quite equals its raw raucous unique ugly-beautiful cry that defies you to do anything but listen to it with the closest attention. Then comes the clapping and the foot stomping, and then the dancing, combined with the other elements. There is only one flamenco song in Iberia. If you love Saura's Flamenco, you'll want to see Iberia, but you'll be a bit disappointed. The style is there; some of the great voices and dancing and music are there. But Iberia's source and conception doom it to a lesser degree of power and make it a less rich and intense cultural experience.

One of the most peculiar oft-used romance movie plots is this one: A seriously messed-up man falls in love with a terminally ill woman, who turns his life around before dying. Occasionally this story is done well and realistically (as in "The Theory of Flight", an excellent weepie), but more frequently it's done like it is here, where as usual the heroine dies of "Old Movie Disease". You know, the terminal illness that has no symptoms but one fainting spell and a need to lie down as you're telling your lover goodbye forever; and your looks aren't affected one bit (and since this is the 70's, neither is your sex life). This is one of the worst versions made of that particular story, where a very silly script puts two incompatible and unbelievable characters together, and they're played by actors who are completely at sea.
This has got to be the worst performance of Al Pacino's career, and I say that after having seen "The Devil's Advocate" only two days ago! He plays a control-freak, emotionally constipated race-car driver, and plays an unlikeable character lifelessly. He seems to constantly be asking himself why he's staying around the grating Marthe Keller (so does the audience), and spends most of the movie just... standing there, usually with his mouth hanging open. The only time he shows any sign of life is towards the end, where his character proves that he's changed from uptight to liberated by doing a hilariously bad Mae West imitation. Hey, it *was* the seventies!
Marthe Keller is equally terrible as the dying love interest; her character was conceived as bold and free and touching and uninhibited and full of life even though dying, and was probably meant to be played with an actress with the sensitivity of, say, Vanessa Redgrave or Julie Christie. Instead, they got the expressionless face and heavy German accent of Ms. Keller, who comes across as more of a scary Teutonic stereotype ("You VILL eat ze omelet!") than anything like lovable. She's supposed to be reforming Pacino and filling him with courage and spirit and all that, but it doesn't work that way, it's more like she's harping on his faults in the most obnoxious possible fashion. This makes for one of the least convincing romances in movie history, where you can't believe she'd be with someone she finds so worthless, and you can't believe he's with someone who gets on his nerves that much.
Some bad-movie fans call this a cult classic, mostly because of Pacino's silly "liberating" Mae West imitation. The scene is a scream, especially in context, but not worth sitting through the rest of the film for. No, only see the film if you're a serious bad-movie aficionado who is especially interested in studying Extreme Lack of Chemistry between leading actors, or Very Bad Casting (not only are the leads terrible, but Pacino's other girlfriend is played by an actress who looks and sounds just likes Keller with shorter hair, I got them totally confused). This isn't one of those laugh-a-minute bad movies like "The Conqueror", it's just a really, really bad movie.