Elisa, vida mia

Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Oona and Charlie and granddaughter of Eugene O'neill, has been making a bigger spot on my radar recently since I saw her in Carlos Saura's undoubted masterpiece Cria Cuervos, playing the frail, pianist mother with health failing as she copes with the philandering cruelty of her uncaring husband. Then I saw her in Alan Rudolph's Remember My Name playing a woman, fresh out of jail from a twelve-year sentence for murder, barely stable and pestering her remarried ex-husband back into her arms. Now this film, where she plays a strong woman remaking her relationship with her father during a stay with him, while slowly realising that she can never return to her partner of seven years. Previously, to me, she was just the unfortunate who fetched up with that stupid and irritating part in Nashville. Nashville was made one year before Cria Cuervos. She was Suara's long-time partner, and they have a child. In this film, Elisa, vida mia, Saura's fascination with Chaplin is as apparent as is Godard's with Anna Karina in Godard's early films.

Cria Cuervos played fast and loose with reality, navigating with uncanny sureness between an account of events in a houshold and a child's misconstrued perception of them. This film is more ambitious in playing with reality and as a result is more obscure and opaque. I can't explain everything in the film.

It starts as Elisa (Chaplin), her sister and her sister's husband arriving by car at the remote farmhouse where Elisa's father lives, to celebrate the father's birthday. The father is played by Fernando Rey. We hear in voice-over Elisa's account of that time - her intermittent contact with her father who had abandoned the family, and her doubts about her relationship with her partner, but read by a male voice. The final scene of the film is the same arrival with the account again in voice-over, but this time read by her voice. What happens in between - - ? There are many scenes of her being warm and bonding with her father. There are confusing scenes to do with a woman who's dead body was found on a path near the father's house. There are industrial noises, shots of skinned horses' heads, scenes with the mother, also played by Chaplin (as was the case in Cria Cuervos).

I came across this summary of the film and it is as good as anything I might write:-

In ELISA, VIDA MIA, Fernando Rey stars as Luis, a contemplative writer, now in his sixties, who years ago moved to an isolated cottage in rural Spain to escape everything he hates about modern life. He is visited by his daughter, Elisa (Geraldine Chaplin), who he had abandoned years ago when he decided to leave her mother and become a writer. As the film opens Luis is reading from a memoir he is writing, but the story he's telling is written from the point of view of Elisa. Carlos Saura uses the full range of narrative possibilities in this film, including internal monologues, dreams, fantasies, wish fulfillment, and multiple view points. Sometimes Saura switches the narrative from Elisa's point of view to her father's internal imagining of what she's telling him. When she tells her father the story of her husband having an affair with her best friend, Sophia, it ends in a wildly unbelievable fashion. Is this story a wish fulfillment of hers? Or was the fantasy in the mind of her father as he writes the story of her visit? The film presents a stream of consciousness narrative that allows the characters to take shape not just through their words and actions, but actually through the progression of their thoughts.