Tag: carlos saura

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A stylized shot of the two lead actors practicing shooting bottles in Carlos Saura's "Deprisa, Deprisa".

Poverty & Criminality in Carlos Saura’s “Deprisa, Deprisa” (1981)

What to say regarding a life of crime for four juveniles who, in an attempt to finance their way out of poverty, are constantly on the run and yet living a nebulous life of nowhereness? Carlos Saura’s Deprisa, Deprisa, which translates to Faster or Hurry, caries an underlining irony to the question of what else is there for them in their otherwise motionless lives if not committing crimes? Perhaps visiting the occasional dance club or shooting cans in a broken, trash-filled field when they’re not burning the cars they robbed—in any event, their lives are equally split between intense boredom and momentary fragments of excitement. This is their present, their future, even, as their lives amount to a nebulous, a bland pulp.

How the story goes is this: Pablo (Jose Antonio Valdelomar González) and his friend Meca (Jesús Arias Aranzueque) steal cars. They do this regularly, then carry out a robbery, and once done they burn the car they stole. They frequent the occasional bar where a young girl named Angela (Berta Socuéllamos) works. Pablo approaches her and asks her out. She agrees. He likes her and she returns the feeling, despite his living within a one-bedroom hovel. Without hesitation, she becomes his girlfriend and begins to accompany him and his two friends on various crime-filled excursions. […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A stylized shot of the main characters in Carlos Saura's "Cria Cuervos".

The Girls, the Garden, the Pictures: On Carlos Saura’s “Cría Cuervos” (1976)

A solemn piano piece plays over sentimental family photos; young Ana, whose wide-eyed face is lingered over in the images (and will come to dominate the screen), moves about in the shadows of a great house. All is sealed off, every space shuttered and the house’s stately surfaces only barely defined by what visible light there is, so that Ana, in a nightgown, appears luminous and strange. She seems to be homing in on a room where a man and woman make furtive and intimate congress; suddenly, the man is seized by some attack, and as the woman rushes out of the room in a disheveled state, the look she gives Ana (and her hurried exit from the darkened manse) tells the viewer just enough about their relationship, or lack thereof. Ana, throughout all of this, is impassive, and when she sees the man lying, slackened by death, in the sheets, she seemingly does not understand why the man cannot respond to her quiet inquiry. This is her father, some distinguished military figure if the pictures offer any clue, and his face now is as opaque as the gloomy interiors of his home.

There is a mostly finished glass of milk on a nearby desk. Its significance, for now, is unknown to us save for Ana’s curious attention towards it in the midst of her father’s death. She takes it and cleans it and in the kitchen (brilliantly lit, the very picture of purity, now) her mother finds her and teasingly chides her – but not all is as it seems. […]