The particular allure is not tangible but rather subtle and pervasive, like a nuance of light or aroma. It’s the feel of the sisters’ unity, the unquestioned solidarity and love that keeps them dancing, and together, their persistent exuberance in spite of the emotional cruelty and stagnation they’ve witnessed. We get an inkling of just how much they know when, after both parents are dead, the girls dress up in their clothing and act out scenes of the marriage. Irene, in wig and mustache, plays the husband, and Ana the wife; suppressing mischievous grins, they mimic to perfection the dialogue of accusation and defense, rising hysteria against grim withdrawal, culminating in, “But the children, the children will hear you!” Even in this parody, the redemptive quality of the girls’ love—and cleverness—overcomes the nastiness.
Judging from other films—Ana and the Wolves, Mama Turns 100, Garden of Delights—Saura’s view of the family is not benign. Generosity and loyalty are the exception; more often the prevailing ambience is indifference, resentment, envy or worse. Cria! shows a marriage in a state of decay, the wife disappointed, frayed by misery and illness and finally dying in agony; the husband a rigid, unprincipled army man, habitually unfaithful, impatient with his wife’s tears and recriminations. The ossified marriage, like many of the bleak or corrupt situations Saura chooses, seems an oblique comment on the Franco regime.
Like his other films, Cria! is emotionally charged, but while it offers the ingredients of high drama—seduction, betrayal, passion, strife, illness, death—it doesn’t hold the viewer by anything so commonplace as plot. What we follow is less a narrative unfolding than characters responding erratically to circumstances and creating new circumstances in turn. That is, like life itself: plotless but dense with events. Right at the outset, the burdens of memory and death announce themselves with a montage of family photos showing the recently deceased mother, played by Geraldine Chaplin, in happier days.
In the very first scene, Ana prowls through the house at night, her face impassive, arresting. In her high-waisted, long white nightgown, she might have stepped out of a Velasquez painting, maybe Las Meninas. Descending the heavy, curved staircase, she hears moans of passion from her father’s room. Then the moaning changes, becomes frantic gasps for breath. A terrified woman, hastily buttoning her dress, rushes from the room and out the door without acknowledging Ana, who stands silent in the darkened living room, apparently unmoved, even unsurprised, by what she soon understands is her father’s sudden death (later we’ll understand why there’s no surprise).
His funeral is stern and lugubrious, a sharp contrast to the children’s colorful bedroom: stiff uniformed men line the windowless room as the girls are brought, one by one, to kiss the lips of the corpse. Ana, who blames her father for her mother’s misery and fatal illness, is the one who refuses: “I don’t want to,” she says, shocking the assembled company.
The story takes place during a school vacation, though it slides effortlessly from present to past and back. With both parents gone, the children are cared for by a well-meaning but officious aunt and an outspoken, devoted housekeeper. Mostly they care for themselves, ambling about the walled-in garden with its empty swimming pool—a big blue abyss—or playing in their room. Saura respects the sobriety of children’s play. Ana tends to her guinea pig. Irene cuts out pictures from fashion magazines for a scrapbook and enlists the tiny Maite to help as best she can: to each according to her needs, from each according to her abilities.
Out of their isolation, they make a utopian family. The dancing and games in the bedroom evoke a peaceable kingdom, L’îsle joyeuse of legend. It’s the lush super-reality, I think, that keeps me returning—to see an illusion made visible, a buried dream of prelapsarian harmony, a perfect mutual understanding none of us has ever known, only dreamed of.
Death, a palpable presence in the house, seeps into the girls’ games. During a weekend visit to friends in the country, they play hide-and-seek on the lawn. In their version, when Ana discovers her sisters’ hiding places, they are supposed to die. “Die!” she commands. Maite collapses in one piece onto the grass; Irene enacts a slow, mock-romantic death, clutching her chest and swooning. The next step is for Ana to revive them. She chants an invocation ending with “Bring my sisters Irene and Maite back to life,” at which they spring up happy and intact. After so much real loss, the game’s wry subtext is, Death, where is thy sting?
The hide-and-seek ritual signifies more than play. Ana believes she has supernatural powers that go even beyond bringing back the dead.
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Using children as protagonists is a delicate venture. Saura avoids all the ready pitfalls by taking the girls utterly seriously. They are not cute or marginal or instrumental; they are not patronized, nor do they represent victimhood or sweet potentiality—all the uses to which children are put in adult movies. We don’t feel sorry for them, or protective. We’re simply mesmerized as the camera lingers on each one caressingly, like the wraithlike mother who smooths Ana’s hair over and over, in wrenching scenes where Ana conjures her up, trying, with all the force imagination can summon, to dream her back to life. This stringent but respectful treatment recalls the historian Philippe Aries’s approach to childhood in his controversial study, Centuries of Childhood. Aries argues that European children in the Middle Ages were regarded as miniature adults who took part in the work and amusements of society, assumed responsibilities and were held accountable for their actions. Only later on did childhood come to be seen as a distinct phase of life, and children regarded as intrinsically other, requiring elaborate civilizing techniques. “In the tenth century, artists were unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale,” Aries writes. Just so, Saura depicts the girls as complex beings on a smaller physical scale, as fully realized and subtly textured as the adult characters around them.
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In between Saura’s first feature, Hooligans (1960), about disaffected, aimless youth and modeled on the Italian postwar realists, and Iberia (2005), a series of musical variations on Albeniz’s Iberia Suite, is a range of exceptional variety—psychological drama, family saga, historical epic, folk tales, an adaptation of Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, and more. The influence of Buñuel is evident, but beyond that, the films are infused with Saura’s distinctive intensity, eccentricity and signature motifs. One of these is extremely thin women, personified by Geraldine Chaplin, who was his muse and partner for ten years and appears in a number of the films. In Cria! she plays the mother, as well as Ana grown up, her bony face filling the screen at intervals, reflecting on her story. For The Seventh Day, a tale of rural feuding that ends in carnage and devastation, made some thirty years later, Saura found a very young actress equally gaunt and used her in exactly the same way.
A recurring image is grim, stately, isolated houses, each with a messy junk room piled with broken furniture, obsolete machinery, outworn paraphernalia, trunks of old clothes that the characters try on in ritualized play. The junk room is like the id of the solid bourgeois household, or perhaps its unconscious, a repository of shards of memory, forgotten fragments that represent swathes of history.
Wheelchairs appear frequently, emblems of paralysis and impotence, another comment on the censorious regime Saura had to keep in mind as he worked. The surreal closing scene of Garden of Delights (1970), one of the most politically explicit of his films, shows all the main characters in wheelchairs, tooling about their spacious, arid garden. (The Spanish government wouldn’t allow Garden of Delights to be screened for the Cannes, Berlin and Venice festivals.)
Photos, emblematic of memory, are ubiquitous. Besides ordinary family snapshots, we see doctors’ X-rays, home movies, clippings from fashion magazines. Indeed Saura revels in all kinds of artifacts and artifice. When the middle-aged protagonist of Garden of Delights suffers amnesia after an auto accident, his father attempts a “cure” by restaging key events from his past. The patient, in his wheelchair, is forced to relive each early trauma, beginning
at the age of five, when his mother punished him by putting him in a dark room with a pig. For this purpose, a pig is trotted into the drawing room: this is Saura at his most eccentric. (Aries’s remark about childhood, in this context, is turned upside down, as Saura depicts the man as a child on a larger scale. The excruciating scene suggests that we carry early traumas forever in their original incarnation and intensity. The adult crying and cringing at the sight of a pig bares the hidden secret, the self revealed like a negative yielding up its contours in a darkroom.)
Women are constantly observed at the labor of artifice—styling their hair, putting on makeup. (In Cria!, an early scene lingers on the girls being dressed and groomed for their father’s funeral.) A scene of a middle-aged woman patiently teasing her hair might serve as a lesson for hairdressing students. My favorite is a woman being taught to put on false eyelashes: once they’re in place, she learns, the lashes must be separated with a pin. Peppermint Frappe, a sinister film from 1967, relies on an elaborate makeover, as an obsessed doctor transforms his meek, dark-haired nurse into the woman he loves—a cavorting blonde sprite in miniskirts. In Buñuel-like fashion, the doctor forces reality to fit his fantasies. Actually, the transformation is not as challenging as it might seem, since both roles are played by Geraldine Chaplin.
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In works grounded in psychology and realism, Little Women, for instance, or worldly social novels, those by Alice Adams, for example, the sisters or friends often number four. Four serves to highlight selected traits, each magnified in a single character, each leading down different paths to different destinies. Three is dense with history and allusion, evoking a more ancient, solemn mood. The Greek Furies who exact vengeance are three, as are the Graces. Not that Saura had Greek myths in mind when making Cria! Rather, the film brings myth to mind: the gravity with which the camera hovers over the girls’ faces gives their features and expressions a weight of allusion, the portent of symbol.
In three-sister stories, similarities trump differences. What matters is that the three undergo the same circumstances, though their responses may vary, as with Chekhov’s three sisters, languishing in the country and dreaming of Moscow, or the sisters in King Lear. The sisters in Cria! endure the same events. Yet while the main story is Ana’s—her inscrutable face is rarely off the screen—Saura grants the fullness of autonomy to each. He gives the last word to Irene, who tells Ana a dream she had of being kidnapped and locked in a room. When the kidnappers phoned her parents to ask for ransom money, no one answered. Just as they were about to shoot her, she woke up. It’s a dream that mingles pubescent fantasies with the anxieties of an orphaned child. It’s also Saura’s way of saying that each girl will bear into the future her own construct of these grief-stricken weeks.
The most ancient triad is the three fates of Greek mythology: Clotho, who spins the thread of life, Lachesis, who measures its length, and Atropos, who snips it. Ana fancies herself a kind of Atropos. She believes she has power over life and death through a secret treasure—a small can containing a deadly poison. One teaspoon could kill an elephant, her mother once told her with mock horror, so throw it in the garbage right away. But Ana took her words literally and kept the can (actually harmless bicarbonate of soda) in a basement junk room near the empty swimming pool. It is this “poison” that she deliberately puts in her father’s bedtime drink the night he dies of a heart attack.
Flush with the delusion of success, she offers it to her grandmother, mute in her wheelchair, whose only diversion is gazing at old family photos. “Do you want to die?” Ana asks her kindly. “I can help you.” At first the grandmother nods, then changes her mind with a poignantly indifferent shrug, as if it hardly matters. Or, why bother? Ana’s final toying with the threads of life comes when she puts the powder in her aunt’s milk, hoping to be rid of her inept stabs at child rearing. The next morning brings a jolt when Aunt Paulina appears, as alive and irritating as ever.
Ana’s playing so nonchalantly with death does not taint the dream of ideal harmony evoked by the sisters’ dancing. That dream has nothing to do with innocence, which is so glibly associated with childhood. Even aside from the “poison,” the sisters certainly aren’t innocent, given the ugliness they’ve seen. I would never be moved or attracted by innocence in any case. Not after my growing up in an era of false innocence. The guiding myth of the postwar Eisenhower years was that decency had definitively triumphed over evil. Parents tried to shield their children, and themselves too, from what they had just lived through. People were basically good, we were taught, or at least educable. If they behaved badly, their education must be at fault. Only much later did I grasp how misguided and dangerously misleading those myths were.
I haven’t a grain of nostalgia for lost innocence; the idea is usually specious to begin with. But the vision of benign human nature that accompanies it dies hard. Cria! is irresistible because it makes that cherished misconception tangible, in the form of the sisters in their private idyll. That idyll also shows the tireless exuberance of childhood, when grief was always intermittent and sorrow could be lightened by a pop tune or a game of hide-and-seek. Because it has the heartbreak of a splendid illusion, I can watch it again and again, and always, it vanishes when I step back into daylight. With this particular illusion, probably that’s for the best.
The morning that shows Aunt Paulina alive and well after drinking the “poison” ends Ana’s illusion about her supernatural powers. It also ends the vacation: it’s time for the girls to put on their school uniforms, leave the walled-in house and garden and take their place in the world. In the closing scene, set to the same bouncy melancholy song that has played throughout, they join the crowd on the busy Madrid street and make their way to school. It’s an image of freedom—escape from the stifling house and its memories of death—but also of conformity. They join a stream of girls in identical uniforms, all headed for the imposing building and the regimentation of class.
Cria! was released to a Spain transformed after Franco’s death. Perhaps the girls streaming into the school represent more of Saura’s wry skepticism: hope for a new generation brought up in freedom, along with the suspicion that no matter what the politics, after vacation, childhood will always be constricted by uniforms and walls.
Ultimate Peek-a-boo
From day one, she stares right at us. We flatter ourselves by thinking, Already she’s interested in us! But the books say that an infant can barely distinguish faces from the pictures on the walls or the furniture. We persevere, stay nearby so she’ll know us. When she does start to distinguish faces from the pictures on the walls and the furniture, we want our face to be one of the important ones. (After her parents, of course. No envy or rivalry there. We know what their love feels like, that love fraught and agitated, doused in anxiety.) Soon she distinguishes us, for sure. She’s happy to see us. When we appear at the door, she has an inkling of what to expect. Because when we’re left alone with her, we let her see our intimate face. We hide our face in our hands, then show it. Look, I’m here. Now I’m not here. Here, not here. And she laughs uproariously.
We talk to her in our intimate voice. We sing to her. And we discover that she’s musical: a born music-lover, like us. She looks nothing like us, though she has a quarter of our genes, but she has the music. We sing to her with our best, our secret, voice, a voice dense with emotion that we’re shy about showing the others, on the rare occasions when we do sing in front of others. And she loves our singing, as no one else in the world does—there’s no reason why they should. We sing and she listens, rapt. It started, this singing, as a way to quiet her when she was fretful, but soon it became our private thing, what we do together. When she can stand up, she dances. We find music with a strong beat and she bounces up and down, little ballet pliés. Over the years, we’ve often danced alone in the kitchen, holding a mixing spoon, and now we have someone to dance those silly dances with.
Now when we appear she looks at us the way no one do
es anymore, and maybe no one ever will again: Oh, it’s you. You intrigue me. Singing, music. I want to know all about you. What else is there, her eyes (gray, green, blue?) ask, besides the music?
Well, I’ve got a few other things up my sleeve, but she’s not quite old enough. I’ll wait until she’s ready—as long as I can, at any rate. I used to think at this point I wouldn’t learn much more, anything truly new, that is. Not so. She’s something I don’t know at all, something left to discover. As she discovers me. Together we’re engaged in an endlessly intriguing mutual scrutiny. And while we’re at it, I’m winning her confidence, so if she ever hears the music of the spheres, she’ll tell me what that sounds like.
Being a grandmother. What to say about a subject so strewn with cliché and sentimentality that it’s as daunting as a minefield? I once heard the writer Grace Paley tell a group of students that the old saw “Write what you know” was too simple-minded. Rather, write what you don’t know about what you know. She was right. There’s no thrill at all in setting down what we already know, or only an accountant’s thrill, a cartographer’s thrill. For instance, that the granddaughter is perfection, the most remarkable child that ever lived, and so on. However true, there’s nothing there to discover. And to write is to discover.
When the platitudes are swept aside—the freedom from responsibility, from the need to discipline, to civilize—we’re left with a peculiar late-life love affair. To understand its potency, you have to ponder love affairs in general, because this one is similar in its inner dynamics, even if the love object is a fraction of your body weight and can’t yet converse, let alone eat properly. The kind of love this new one most resembles is that most universal and best-documented of genres, teen love: the same giddy absorption, the same loss of all sense of proportion, the same transcendent idiocy, when a mere glance from the beloved in the school cafeteria could send us into fluttery spasms. Anything more emphatic brought rampant joy—until the inevitable crash.
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