The A to Z of Spanish Cinema by Alberto Mira

Author:Alberto Mira
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2010-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

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MAR ADENTRO / THE SEA INSIDE (2004). Alejandro Amenábar’s follow-up to his extraordinary box-office hit The Others showed a definite change of direction, shifting from fantasy plots and Hitchcock-influenced suspense to a testimonial story inspired by the real-life case of quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro, who struggled for 28 years to be allowed to die. The plot sounded like yet another unpromising issue-led film: after all, how could a film about someone who cannot leave his bed be made entertaining? But it was to Amenábar and his co-scriptwriter Mateo Gil’s credit that they managed to find the emotion, the humor, and even the suspense in the story, capturing audience’s minds and hearts. Indeed, Mar adentro became one of the films of the year internationally, winning the Academy Award for best foreign film, as well as the Golden Globe and a record-breaking 14 Goyas.

To incarnate a perfectly delineated group of characters, Amenábar counted on a strong cast. Belén Rueda was outstanding as the lawyer who also suffers from a disease and tries to help Ramón find a way out of his suffering. Lola Dueñas was touching as the working-class single mother who falls in love with the man. Other parts went to Mabel Rivera, Tamar Novas, Celso Bugallo, and José María Pou, who contributed with intense performances. But, of course, the film is driven by a towering central performance by Javier Bardem; fresh from his turn as Santa, in Los lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun, Fernando León de Aranoa, 2002), he displays a wealth of registers and emotions, rightly choosing to play up the wittier aspects of the character rather than go for sentimentalism.

MARCELINO PAN Y VINO / THE MIRACLE OF MARCELINO (1955). One of the first international hits of Spanish cinema (a great success in Italy and other Catholic countries), Ladislao Vajda’s Marcelino pan y vino is also, in spite of its sentimentalism and topical aspects, one of the most accomplished Spanish films of the 1950s. It tells the story, narrated as a kind of fairy tale to a bedridden girl, of an orphan brought up by a group of monks. As he grows up, he becomes a happy child who brings joy to his surrogate fathers even as he causes havoc at the monastery and gives them funny nicknames which became very popular in Spain at the time. Still, he has moments of melancholy, when he misses the presence of a mother.

In the film’s second half, he visits an old attic in the monastery and soon engages in a relationship with a wooden image of Jesus Christ on the cross. He brings the suffering man bread and wine, and in exchange, Jesus says he will take Marcelino to his mother. In the last scene, he is discovered dead by the monks.

Marcelino pan y vino was enriched with a heart-warming performance by child actor Pablito Calvo, who captivated audiences with his rueful smile and big eyes, and started a vogue both for child actors and a new kind of religious films, less heroic than those of the previous generation.

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