Tiempo de silencio

Disturbing and rare drama , including some surrealist elements , based on a known and successful novel , being written by Luis Martínez Santos and mostly filmed in city of Madrid . Set late 40s or early 50s , it deals with Pedro Martín (Imanol Arias) , an investigator doctor who investigates about cancer with guinea pigs at a laboratory . Helped by Amador (Paco Algora) , Pedro meets El Muecas (Paco Rabal) -who delivers him rats- and his family , wife : Ricarda (Margarita Calahorra) and daughters : Florita (Diana Peñalver) and Pilar (Blanca Apilanez) . Muelas and his poor , distressed family live in ruined barracks , Madrid outskirts . Meanwhile , Pedro's old land lady (Rosario Ortega) pretends her granddaughter Dorita (Victoria Abril) to marry Martín . At night , Pedro and Matias (Juan Echanove) , a peculiar young of higher class and with Edipo complex , go out to have fun , drinking and enjoying at a brothel . Later on , Muecas looks for Pedro to help for his ill daughter Florita , but there happens a tragedy . After that , Pedro is denounced by El Cartucho (Joaquin Hinojosa) and he is detained .

Well paced film , adding a correct 1949 setting that shows really a sordid period of misery and repression by that time . Here writer/director Vicente Aranda adapts faithfully the complex , personal and famous novel homonymous written by Luis Martínez Santos publicized in 1962 . The flick being nicely developed results to be a thought-provoking chronic of the post-Spanish Civil War in a "typical" Madrid microcosm itself . It blends war fares , intense drama , poor townspeople , strange roles , imagination , intrigue , vengeance , and raw happenings . Interpretation by great actors are top-notch , Charo López plays two different roles , as mother and prostitute , and Victoria Abril performs three , this visual solution carried out by Vicente Aranda is to show the increasing lust between the roles . Aranda analyzes the moral and social degradation of the post-war , class differences , the memory of the vanquished , almost always appealing to the techniques of social realism , but experiencing sometimes with other Avant-Garde narrative devices , provided with various degrees of irony . It is a special story of loves , incest , clashes between social stratum , vendettas , lies and with intrigues behind . This provoking as well as strong story is a passionate retelling and a touching drama . And dealing with a thorny theme : incest , that was also treated by Aranda in ¨La Muchacha De Las Bragas De Oro¨ and ¨Crimen Capitan Sánchez¨ from ¨Huella Del Crimen¨ series . The main problem has to face "Tiempo De Silencio", beyond not being able to avoid falling into rudeness is precisely derived from the coldness of its staging , which eventually become monotonous over two hours of footage . This is a Spanish enough budget production and obtained moderated success in the box-office . Excellent cast forming a powerful human group of actors and giving adequate interpretations . However , the roles are mostly sluttish and crude . Imanol gives fine acting , he played 5 successive films for Aranda . Victoria Abril -who performed 10 Aranda movies , one of the best collaborations of the 80s and 90s - steals the show , she is absolutely hypnotic , winning yet another magnetic interpretation with three smoldering characters , playing different women looking a lot like Dorita , but it was not in the original novel . Very good support cast , such as : Paco Algora , Diana Peñalver , Juán José Otegui , Felix Rotaeta , Maria Isbert , Queta Claver as a Madame and the great Francisco Rabal who plays ¨El Muecas¨ , a role who bears remarkable resemblance to his Azarias from the prestigious ¨Holy innocents¨ .

The film , without soundtrack , includes songs of the post-war as ¨Por La Calle De Alcala¨ . Adding a spotless pictorial cinematography by Juan Amorós , he proceeds a photography with juicy and evocative atmosphere . Juán Amoros is deemed to be one of the best Spanish cameraman with a long artistic career . The motion picture was professionally directed in his particular style by veteran filmmaker Vicente Aranda , being hard to follow . It won several prizes , such as : Murcia Week of Spanish Cinema 1986, Won Francisco Rabal Award Best Actor ; Sant Jordi Awards 1987 Won Sant Jordi Best Spanish Actor Juan Echanove and Nominated Goya Best Lead Actress Victoria Abril . Aranda directed a series of award-winning movies firmly establishing him as one of the best Spanish filmmakers . He often includes strong as well as exuberant sex scenes . His usual film editor is own wife , Teresa Font . Vicente is an expert on literary adaptations , as he has adapted four novels written by Juan Marsé Canciones Amor en Lolita's Club (2007), El Amante Bilingüe (1993), Si Te Dicen Que Caí (1989) and La Muchacha De Las Bragas De Oro (1980). Vicente often shoots strong erotic scenes , being ¨jealousy¨, a customary issue in his films . Vicente has been working from the 60s with ¨Fata Morgana¨ , ¨Las Crueles¨ , ¨Novia Ensangrentada¨ , ¨Clara es el Precio¨ , among others . His greatest successes were intense dramas with plenty of sex , such as ¨Pasion Turca¨ , ¨Intruso¨ , ¨Carmen¨ , along with a delinquency tale : ¨El Lute¨ I and II starred by Imanol Arias , his fetish actor along with Victoria Abril . His biggest hit was ¨Amantes¨ , although originally intended to be produced as an episode of the TV crime anthology series 'La Huella Del Crimen 2' (1991), before producer Pedro Costa decided to rewrite the script as a theatrical film and subsequently the historical story titled ¨Juana La Loca¨ .

Based on a novel of a classical architecture which ventured into a neorrealist style reaching out for new linguistic possibilities, frequently resorting to prosaic euphemisms and extreme baroquisms and incurring in a few ungainly metaphorisms. Luis Martín-Santos wrote the book in 1961; a psychiatrist by profession he sought to analyse his characters – I nearly wrote `victims' – from a coldly elevated level, and in so doing he plunged into an abstract world of grandiloquent verbosity, breaking away from the standard set-piece language of Spanish literature of the time. Various narrators are used for different scene shifts. All this is plainly difficult to transpose onto the screen.

Pedro is a scientist working in a laboratory investigating the carcinogenic glands of a curious strain of Illinois rats. These rats are bred in a shanty town on the outskirts of Madrid, where he is called one night to help save a girl who is dying from a badly carried out abortion attempt. From here on Pedro falls into helplessness as a `time of silence' takes over his life. Moving from the sordid life of shanty dwellings to the hypocracy of the then middle classes such as in the lodging house or in the home of his friend Matias' parents and to the veneered essence of supposed luxury and wealth in the brothel, the film endeavours to catch at least the social ambientation of the times, and does so fairly well mostly. However there is also that something which is always missing when literature is turned into a film. Never more so than here, as the curious style of Martín-Santos cannot really be touched apon in this or any other screen adaptation.

For the intelligent reader who has read the book and understood all its implicit meanings, this film survives fairly well on its own merits as a rather risky incursion into cinematographic formulas. Vicente Aranda and the main actors have carried off the job reasonably well and the result should not be disdained.