Did seeing The Artist make you wish for another black-and-white homage to silent film? Look no further than this Spanish effort. Where The Artist tweaks silent-film conventions, this one plays it just about straight. Though still playful, if not quite comedic, at times, it’s mostly an old-fashioned melodrama, beginning with twin tragedies, continuing with a wicked stepmother, and winding up with (mostly) good-natured dwarves. As the title‘s translation suggests, it’s infused with fairy-tale elements…and bullfighting.
The key character, the long-suffering Carmen, is played by the appealing Sofía Oria as a girl and by Macarena García as a young woman. (Maribel Verdú, of Y tu mamá también and Pan’s Labyrinth, has a prominent role. This kind of slightly unreal story, set in the 1920s, is the perfect kind of story for a silent film. It’s didn’t grab me as immediately as The Artist (though in time), but it was almost as lovely to look at, with scenes set in a lush mansion, enormous arenas, and the open landscape. The score by Alfonso de Vilallonga is tremendously varied and truly carries the film along, and the ending, while not to every taste, is slightly mysterious, mostly surprising, and entirely fitting.
IMDb link
viewed at Ritz 5 7:35 pm 5/8/13 and reviewed 5/8/13
No comments:
Post a Comment