Spain, 1983
Directed by Victor Erice
With Sonsoles Aranguren (Estrella at 8), Icíar Bollaín (Estrella at 15), María Massip (Estrella adult), Omero Antonutti (Agustín Arenas), Lola Cardona (Julia Arenas), Germaine Montero (Doña Rosario), Rafaela Aparicio (Milagros), Aurore Clément (Irene Ríos)
It comes out, the faint light, slowly, delicately, on a right corner of the screen which has been from the start a solid black against which the thin white letters of the credits have appeared. Then it lingers, proving it has a shape: this is a window, closed, letting in the dawn of a new day. Light gets brighter, yet it remains soft. Soon the space next to it gets lighted, revealing a bed, a young woman in the bed, a young woman slowly waking up as in the distance a dog barks frantically and a woman shouts anxiously.
The narrative seems to come out straight from the night, the nothingness, another world perhaps, but also, more effectively, from the darkness of a camera obscura ready to receive the rays of light that would create an image or of movie theater whose audience gets ready to enjoy a film’s colors and motions. And the rising voice-over bolsters the impression, as the speaking woman is plainly reminiscing her past – a concept an English novelist once magnificently termed “another country” – starting a long flashback of a narrative.
This is a film where characters often emerge physically from darkness, where they step into the life of lead character Estrella and her memories from far away, arriving from nearly mythical places that belong to geography, history, nostalgia, imagination, where the scenes featuring them fade smoothly in and out in black, unfolding in a deliberate pace. Cinematography seems under the influence of Baroque chiaroscuro paintings, with images coming straight from a George de la Tour painting or a masterwork by Il Caravaggio. It is indeed a powerful reminder of the uncanny ability of cinema to deliver a full and lively world out of the nothingness of a silver screen and in the midst of the theater’s darkness thanks to a deftly crafted tapestry of lights, colors, sounds. It is also a testament to the spellbinding power of memories while underlining human experience is woven into far more sentimental, spiritual, magical, irrational dimensions that nevertheless drives the individual into an unremitting despair as well as into unmitigated bliss.
The titular place is right away defined as a myth pertaining to the origins of the family made up of Estrella, her father Agustín Arenas, and her mother Julia Areas, and now a place impossible to reach. It does send at one point, Estrella’s first holy communion, envoys: a grandmother, Doña Rosario, and a maid who is more of a companion now to the granny after having, so long ago, looked after Agustín Arenas, Milagros, but they would depart without taking anyone with them and letting the teenager nearly as puzzled by the details of her daddy’s story as before. The south would never been a topic for conversation but it is where Estrella decides to go at the end, after her father’s death – a journey that would not be related, cast in the dark of an unforeseeable future.
Life has been settled up in the North, the cold, far colder North (mark the peculiar light, spot all those warm clothes). Why the distance? Agustín Arenas would not tell, ever, but Julia Arenas would point to a clash with his father and Milagros would correct and complete the relation, up to a point, and not so satisfactorily to Estrella’s mind. It is not bluntly articulated, but the cause is the 1936 – 1939 Civil War, the many feuds, even among relatives, it fanned. The film does not drive it home but the ghosts of the war clearly lurk around.
Other specters shape later the life of Agustín, slowly warping his mood and eroding the bond with Estrella, a strong intimate relation that is the true core of the narrative. It should be noted this bond has more than a raw, emotional quality: it is also bears a magical character. From the start, as that new dawn breaks and Julia looks desperately for her husband Estrella catches and plays with the object she has just found in her bed, a discovery that makes her realize right away Agustín would never come back since he deliberately trusted it to her: a pendulum. Quite astonishingly for a hospital doctor who sided with the Republic against, among other enemies, the Church, Agustín believes in supernatural powers and is also hired as a dowser. He readily teaches his daughter, who is then barely 8, how to hold and then use a pendulum, the magical artifact that supposedly enabled him to predict he would be indeed the father of a girl.
As the narrative proceeds it is clear how this pagan and supernatural behavior casts the father into a special light and turn the relation between father and daughter into something more profound, spiritual than what defines the relation between Estrella and Julia, which more mundane, more straightforward, more tender, but then in ordinary terms: the physical and emotional interactions anyone would expect on-screen and in real life, the same kind of gestures and words, though performed gracefully. That does not mean there is not tenderness on the other side, but it is captured in an altogether different atmosphere derived from the chiaroscuro logic of the cinematography – darkness, whether it is an attic or a church, conceals the very benevolent figure of a father eager to hug and understand and then doing just that as he is slowly released from that darkness (which thus has none of the scary and devilish nature it could be easily associated with – the eeriness surrounding Estrella is wonderful and not tragic; tragedy would come from another world).
But it is rather misunderstanding and confusion that would rise when Estrella realizes there is someone else on her father’s mind. It is drawings made hastily but repeatedly on papers Estrella shuffles in a desk one evening, with an odd name scribbled around them, a name that would get printed below a silhouette on a movie poster, a face and a name becoming somebody alive and kicking, and performing, in black and white moving images suddenly displayed in the editing. Agustín’s anxious, intent stare watches the fictional film and becomes the focus of the editing, haunted by that other kind of spectral presence, the fake two-dimensional reality contrived by cinema (and indeed, the film character ends up being a specter, as she is murdered by her partner), which in turn conjures up other images, distant ones too, but born out of his memory, the reminiscence of a love affair that mattered so much but stopped abruptly. A letter would be sent to Irene Ríos, an answer would be received, but not really the one expected, and so a man would increasingly wobble and eventually break apart.
This is the story of a grief, an adult woman fondly and sadly mourning and remembering a father whose angst and suffering darkened her adolescence and caused a decisive rupture in her life. This is a film which expertly creates and revels in singular atmospherics, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, celebrating mystery and melancholy. The father till the ends keeps a secretive nature: Agustín never expresses in plain terms what he experienced, what he feels, what crosses his mind. It would never be clear why he left and above, why he was so fascinated with Irene Ríos, what disillusion or regret or whatever undermined his balance so fatally. The film touches upon unspoken tragedies without elaborating and advertising anything: it simply turns pages magically evocative of things and feelings buried deep in one’s experience of life even as the individual builds an essential, unforgettable relation with others.
“El Sur – The South” is a most beautiful film whose fate is still decades later a bone of contention: director Victor Erice wrote a 400-page screenplay and envisioned a long feature, but the shooting was stopped by lead producer Elías Quejetera, as other production partners were grumbling. Erice has always considered “El sur – The South” an incomplete film and yet it can be argued that as it stands it is nevertheless powerful – and powerfully coherent. What would the turn in the South Estrella plans bring to the story of her father that would keep him as riveting as he is? His opacity tinged with generosity and intelligence, brilliantly conveyed by actor Omero Antonutti, is precisely what makes him so striking and loving, a complex figure walking among ghosts and losing his confidence even as he sustains the self-confidence of a girl. And this is what makes Estrella’s reminiscences so poignant and fascinating.