Cria Cuervos

This film was made by the prolific Carlos Saura in 1976. Saura was born in 1932 and at the time of writing has made about 43 films, starting in 1956, and he has four film projects in progress. Cria Cuervos is his masterpiece. He wrote the screenplay and directed the film, and one has a strong sense of his confidence and sureness as he navigates a complicated narrative.

The story concerns a household of three children, the housekeeper, Rosa, played by Florinda Chico,  their mother and their aunt, Paulina, played excellently by Mónica Randall. One of the children, Ana, is played by the wonderful Ana Torrent, who's first film was Spirit of the Beehive. The mother is played by Geraldine Chaplin (who also plays grown-up Ana), and this must surely be her best film. Chaplin was, when this film was made, Saura's partner. She made Nashville in the same year as this film. Saura's mother was a pianist who gave up a professional career for her family, which is also the case of the Chaplin character in Cria Cuervos.

The narrative navigates between the events in this household and the imaginative construction of them by Ana, as she tries to cope with her mother's mistreatment by her father. Some scenes are 'real', and some are Ana's construction of them. Saura conjures deeply moving and evocative scenes from mundane events, such at the scene where the children play a game in the garden during a weekend visit. Torrent's sad eyes and wise-beyond-her-years appearance persuaded me that Ana, while misconstruing the events of the household, was also seeing them more clearly than the adults; a wonderful achievement. Most striking was the assured confidence with which Suara moved between the different realities of the film, as though an unseen hand were on his shoulder, guiding him, at a time of powerful inspiration.

this film was made in the dying days of the Franco regime in Spain, and it is not difficult to read the film as an analogy of the politics at the time.