Corrie Film Club – the risks of rearing ravens
Cría Cuervos, to be shown in Corrie Hall on Sunday February 12th, won the Special Jury Prize Award at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, for good reason. It is an extraordinary film about an eight-year-old girl thrown into a state of half fantasy by her father’s death – not macabre but with a strange, allegorical poetry. The title comes from a Spanish proverb, ‘Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos’, meaning, ‘Bring up young ravens and they’ll peck out your eyes.’ In other words, children treated as if they are fierce birds will turn out to be exactly that. Directed by Carlos Saura, it features Ana Torrent as the child of the same name though Geraldine Chaplin takes over the part as Ana grows older. Chaplin was Saura’s partner and inspiration, and appeared in ten of his films. In Cría Cuervos she speaks Spanish with an English accent as the child’s mother, but when playing Ana as a young woman she is dubbed by actress Julieta Serrano.
The story begins with eight-year-old Ana’s overhearing of her father in bed with a woman who dresses quickly and rushes out of the house. Ana goes into the room and finds her father dead, apparently from a heart attack. She carries a half-full glass of milk down to the kitchen and washes it carefully. Her mother, unaware of what has happened, scolds her for being up so late and sends her off to bed – or does she? Reality and fantasy mingle. Ana’s mother is already dead. She has blamed her father, a Fascist military man, for her mother’s death, and the glass of milk she gave him contained a white powder she believed to be lethal, which is why she washed it so carefully.
Aunt Paulina comes to supervise Ana, her two sisters and a wheelchair-bound grandmother, helped by a house-maid called Rosa. Ana takes refuge in the basement, where she keeps her ‘lethal’ powder, and where she finds an apparition of herself from twenty years in the future. This adult Ana, looking exactly like her mother, recalls her childhood as a long period of time, ‘sad, full of fear, fear of the unknown’.
Ana rebels against her aunt’s authoritarian style. Though diverted by the presence of her two sisters, Ana’s only true companions are the family maid, Rosa, and her pet guinea pig, Roni. When she finds Roni dead in his cage one morning, she feels there is nothing more to live for. She goes to see her grandmother and offers her a chance to share in merciful death through a spoonful of the lethal white powder that killed her father. The old woman knows the powder is simply bicarbonate of soda. Ana’s mother had told her, perhaps to warn her that it was not sugar, that it was a poison so powerful that one spoonful would kill an elephant. But the grandmother does not explain this, and Ana tries to poison her aunt with a glass of milk containing the same powder. But in the morning, Paulina is still alive. Ana goes to school with her two sisters, for the first time seeing the vibrant and noisy city that has never previously been part of her ghost-ridden world.
This film was made during a period where Carlos Saura was considered one of the great opponents of the Franco regime. He took refuge in the obvious smoke screen, saying that childhood ‘is one of the most terrible parts in the life of a human being. … you’ve no idea where it is you are going, only that people are taking you somewhere, leading you, pulling you and you are frightened.’ The film can be seen this way, but it has a double layer of allegory. At a time of intense political repression, its contrasting of reality and mistaken belief were seen by sympathisers as a powerful criticism of fascism. It was shot in the summer of 1975, as Franco lay dying, and was a huge international success. It’s now considered a classic of Spanish cinema.
Screening at Corrie Hall starts at 8.00 pm. All are welcome, and there is no charge, though a voluntary contribution to the hall’s upkeep would be gratefully welcomed.
