El Sur

The Spanish filmmaker, Victor Erice, has made three feature films, The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, and The Quince Tree Light.  It is one of film history's great tragedies that Erice has not been more prolific -- on the other hand, perhaps, his extremely deliberative art is inconsistent with more numerous film projects.  Furthermore, if his three features seem to comprise a progression, it is possible that Erice's devotion to the beauty of the image can simply not progress beyond the almost abstract and non-narrative The Quince Tree Sun (1993).  El Sur is so startlingly beautiful, so exactly attuned to the nuances of light, the time of the day, the season, that the viewer is distracted away from the events portrayed.  As in silent film, the images tell the story and words are wholly secondary and, in El Sur, the images, themselves, are entirely expressionistic -- they don't have an objective reality but rather are more distinct than reality, hyper-real, suffused with the meaning-laden content of memory.  Consider the scenes involving the child-heroine's first communion.  There is a question as to whether the girl's communist-atheist father will attend.  We see the ceremony of the first communion and, then, the child is told that her father has come into the church but is waiting for her in the back of the sanctuary.  She approaches a pillar that is only dimly lit standing beside a well of impenetrable darkness and, then, her father emerges, shadowy at first from the inky blackness and, then, the light seizes him, as it were by the scruff of the neck, and makes him briefly round, statuesque himself, rim-lit against the densest and deepest blacks imaginable -- this is not how real light works, not even how the eye interprets things:  it's an entirely artificial but profoundly moving effect.  This is the use of light as a beam irradiating the past and showing us the contents of memory -- no real life blacks are as dark as those Erice shows in El Sur.  And similarly, no real life brightness shines with the honeyed and exquisite luminosity of the rays of light suffusing this film. 

There's not much of a story although the narrative is very intricate with meaning.  A mature woman narrates the film, apparently relying on diaries written by the little girl who, with her father, is the protagonist.  The child, Estrella, wears a little star ring on her hand -- and the director uses pinpoint beams to illumine the star against the film's gloom.  Her father, Agustin, is a melancholy man, apparently, a physician at the local hospital.  He is from the South of Spain, Seville as we are told in Adelaide Garcia Morales' novella on which the movie is partially based.  Something has damaged him -- he's a morose solitary drinker.  He is a dutiful husband to his wife, Julia, but she is remote -- living apart from him and reading novels.  (One of the film's touchstones is the gothic family mysteries in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.) The little girl struggles to comprehend the trauma that has made her father into a solitary and lonely man.  One day, she finds an envelope on  which her father has written the name "Irene Rios" over and over again.  A few years later, she is walking downtown when she sees her father's motorcycle parked in front of a movie theater.  The movie theater is showing a tawdry melodrama starring in a secondary role an actress named Irene Rios.  After the movie ends, Agustin goes to a bar, the Café Oriental where he drinks cognac and tries to write a letter.  The little girl spies on him and, then, talks to him.  He won't tell her anything.  Years pass and Agustin has become more withdrawn and bitter -- we don't really see what has happened to him:  there are no violent quarrels or angry outbursts, although the film implies, without showing any evidence, that the family has become deeply dysfunctional.  Agustin takes his teenage daughter to lunch at the town's Gran Hotel.  Estrella asks her father about Irene Rios.  He evades the question and goes to the toilet to wash his face.  In the next room, a wedding party is underway and the band plays the same Paso Doble that was played by an accordion at Estrella's First Communion party.  Father and daughter speak briefly and the narrator announces that it was the last time they would see one another.  The next shot shows the fortified town in the dying light, beyond a river that reflects the twilight sky -- the panning camera shows Augustin lying in the marshes a shotgun beside his head and, oddly enough, Estrella's bicycle resting on its side next to the water.  This scene loops back to the beginning of the film, a sequence showing the light gradually growing in Estrella's bedroom, as we hear people shouting out Augustin's name -- he is now missing, and, later, we learn lost because he has taken his own life.  Estrella finds in his effects a phone number in Seville, packs her bags, and announces that she is departing for the South.  Then, abruptly the film ends. 

Morales' source novella continues for about 12 more pages of its 44 page length after that scene.  According to the screenplay, the south was going to be visualized as an exuberant explosion of white-hot light.  Estrella goes to Seville, locates the woman who was Irene Rios (it is her stage name), and, even, interacts a little with a young man to whom she is drawn but who may well be her brother.  The novella eschews any sort of highly consequential ending and, in fact, simply dies out itself in a haze of recollections.  Erice got into a fight with his producer, Elias Querejeta -- it was a pure personality conflict.  Querejeta cut off funding for the film after completing the scenes in the north and no footage was ever shot in the south or Seville.  Worse, Querejeta spread word that Erice was too perfectionist and that he had delayed the film by reshooting scenes over and over again.  (This allegation seems to have been true.)  Querejeta said to others in the Spanish film industry that you work with Erice at your peril -- and these statements as to Erice's unreasonableness came to define the director:  except for a short subject, Lifeline in the omnibus film The Trumpet: Ten Years Older -- said to be very brilliant -- and the experimental Quince Tree project, Erice has not been able to get any other films made and he is now 76. 

The movie, as it stands, is frustratingly incomplete and enigmatic.  Erice's style is so dense and suggestive that the film is about any number of things.  Most dramatically, the film is about how one's vision of your father changes as you age:  initially to the little girl, Augustin is a magician:  he is dowser and finds water with crossed willow branches and he uses a pendulum (which he later bequeaths to his daughter) as divining tool.  Later, he is a mentor as he teaches his daughter these occult practices and, then, when she is a teenager, and wants to date, her adversary.  She is always potentially his lover -- we seem him happily dancing with her.  For a part of the film, his absence defines him to his child -- he is the indifferent, withdrawn father, who withholds his love from wife and daughter.  His life is a mystery that his daughter sets out to solve.  Finally, she seems him simply as a lonely man and a wounded sexual being.  Each of these incarnations of the father is convincingly represented.  Further, the film is uncertain (as is the novella) as to what has damaged Augustin:  perhaps, his turbulent relationship with his own father caused his sorrows.  But there are also implications that he was arrested during the Civil War and somehow damaged.  Finally, there is the question of the love affair with Irene Rios -- what is the significance of those events?  The opening scene in the film shows the light gradually suffusing Estrella's room -- she is seen awakening and these images are fundamental to the film:  the movie is about Estrella's dawning awareness of her father's sorrow and melancholy.  It is about, in some sense, her own awakening.  This is the sort of exquisitely designed film in which each image is composed to within an inch of its life and, then, lit with surrealistic ingenuity -- objects stand out against stark black backgrounds.  It reminds me of paintings by Spanish artists of lemons that seem to shine with a supernatural light or humble loaves of bread infused with an otherworldly radiance.  "We moved to a walled town," the narrator says and we are shown a medieval walled city like something out of the background of a Duerer painting.  Everything is at once quotidian and densely supernatural, symbolic, things in a secret, mysterious world.