El sur

I feel compelled to relate this as it has been at least ten years since I saw this film (in a student union theater) and it still has a powerful hold on my memory. I have been unable to find it on video, so my recollections are fragmentary.

I was so impressed, involved, and moved by this tale that I left the cinema feeling as if I were floating just above the pavement. One is quietly and adroitly drawn in by the mystery that the young daughter in 1950s Spain senses in her father. The political dimension is brilliantly nuanced, carefully alluded to without speechifying. The wondrous cinematography captures light so deftly at times that it is almost luminous: late afternoon sunlight across a room, snow slowly falling (viewed through a window), a rain soaked street at night. As the daughter grows to adolescence the enigma of her reticent father begins to clear. It may not sound like much in my words, but from wool Victor Erice has spun gold.

I don't really keep a list of most-wanted-but-unavailable movies, but, if I did, this film, the second of only three features of Victor Erice, director of Spirit of the Beehive, would have been very high on it. It is, to understate, far from a disappointment. Very much a sister film to Spirit, it's about a woman, Estrella, who as a narrator remains off screen, reminiscing about her relationship with her father (Omero Antonutti). As a child (where she is played by Sonsoles Aranguren), she worshiped the man. Behind the perceived god, though, he was quite a sad man, haunted by history. Estrella discovers a particular secret which dominates the man's mind. In her teenage years (where she's played by Iciar Bollain), that secret comes back. This is an achingly gorgeous film, very quiet and largely shot in shadowy, cold sunlight. The images are every bit as gorgeous as Spirit's, and the story is, too. Criterion apparently owns the rights to this. Many of the films that are only streaming on Hulu will never see a home video release, but they really should put this one out there. It's a masterpiece.

Unless there are impenetrable barriers, most young children love their parents unconditionally, perceiving them as all knowing and all loving. Of course, with growing up often comes a realization that the parents you put on a pedestal are just human beings with flaws, some small, some big. This realization comes reluctantly to Estrella in Victor Erice's poignant 1983 film, El Sur (The South, the beautiful story of the relationship of a daughter and her father, one of only three feature films Erice made in forty years, each one a masterpiece.

Based on the novella of the same name by Adelaida Garcia Morales, the story takes place in the context of post–civil war Spain. Narrated powerfully by fifteen-year-old Estrella, the film is composed of memories and fantasies as she seeks to make sense of the painful events of her childhood. Shot by cinematographer José Luis Alcaine using only natural light, the opening conveys a feeling of an enchanted world. In the first frame, Estrella (Iciar Bollain) awakens in a darkened room with the light focusing only on her. The camera zooms to her hands as she discovers a small box under her pillow containing the pendant her father used as a divining rod.

In her memory, it is the symbol of her father's power that he once used to guess her sex by holding the pendant over her mother's stomach. In the background, we hear a dog barking and Estrella's mother (Lola Cardona) calling for her husband Agustín (Omero Antonutti), but he is nowhere to be found and Estrella knows that he is not coming back. It is only then that the camera moves to her face where a tear is visible. El Sur then flashes back seven years when eight-year-old Estrella, sensitively portrayed by Sonsoles Aranguren, and her parents have moved from the south of Spain and are traveling by train to the north where Agustin has found a job as a doctor in a local hospital.

Estrella's insights into events taking place around her are mature beyond her age. "I grew up more or less like everyone else," she says, getting used to being alone and not thinking too much about happiness." When she is older, her father, whom she idolizes, instructs her in the art of divination and she looks at it as a transfer of a supernatural gift. The slow-developing story reveals the shift in Estrella's perception both of her father and of her country. As she begins to learn more about the war that divided her family and her country, her view of the south as the mythical place depicted in postcards and movies, begins to unravel.

To Estrella, her father's life in the south has always been a mystery and she questions Milagros (Rafaela Aparicio), her father's former governess who is visiting their house, about his life. The governess tells her of the rift her father had with his own father who favored Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and how unhappy his life had been when he was growing up. Estrella's discovery of Agustin's devotion to the starlet Irene Rios (Aurore Clément) whose films played at the local theater is even more unsettling, however, as is the matter of his continuing relationship with a mysterious woman in the south.

The nature of the circumstances that are revealed in the film, however, do not prepare us sufficiently for the events that follow. Forced to curtail production before completion, Erice would have traced Estrella's journey back to the south to uncover the reality of her father's despair, but lack of funding did not permit this and the film, which Erice claims would have become much lighter in tone, was never finished. Although, because of the film's incompleteness, character motivations are murky, El Sur is still a brilliant and haunting work of art. A timeless film of symbol and myth, it was voted the sixth best Spanish film in the 1996 Spanish cinema centenary.

This story unfolds in delicate time in the history of modern Spain, as well as during a precarious time in the life of a family.

Adolescent Estrella lives in awe of her mysterious and magical father, wonderfully played by Omero Antonutti, and weary of her ever-practical mother and of their isolated life in the misty and brooding northern countryside. Estrella's fascination with her father turns to intrigue- and then to obsession- when she discovers that her father has a secret, and realizes that she is only one facet of her father's life and not the central figure, as he is to her.

After a ray of sunshine is cast into her dark and insular life by the visit of one of her father's aunts (played by the late Rafaela Aparicio in one of her best roles), Estrella yearns to capture more of the essence of her father by one day visiting "el sur" (the south)—his home territory.

As Estrella enters the awkward realm of adolescence, she grows apart from her father emotionally. A tragic turn of events condemns him to remain a mythical figure for her—someone she wonders if she ever knew at all. The supreme irony is that she is very like him.

This film is captivating, both visually and emotionally, and the audience becomes just as absorbed in the story as the characters themselves. It is one of those films whose imagery will always stay in one's memory, such as in the my favorite scene, where father and daughter sit distantly across a table from each other in an old café, listening to the eerie sound of a "pasodoble" that wafts from a wedding in another room, bringing memories of happier, simpler days.

His first film was a lucid, enigmatic and fascinating film entitled "The Spirit of the Beehive", about a young girl in post-Civil War Spain who becomes obsessed with finding the spirit of Frankenstein's monster. His second film, "The South", is nominally about the same things, the delicate and subsequently shattered innocence of childhood, the power of the cinema, and in a more direct yet completely oblique way, the effects that the Spainish Civil War had on that country, as 'the south' becomes to our protagonist this mythic enigma of a place functioning as both heaven and hell, mostly filled in by her father's former nanny's descriptions of the complex situation the war had, and the tossed-off manner in which the stories of the father and his father are delivered are engrossingly enigmatic, theoretically to keep from exposing a closed wound to the young child, but are given in such a vivid shorthand that all the buried truths are there to discover for any discerning viewers older than the protagonist.

The film chronicles a young girl named Estrella who is living in northern Spain who considers her father almost a deity, he is interesting, pleasant and in her eyes, possibly magic, as his enchantment towards mysticism seems to carry on to his daughter. But one day, she discovers a letter by her father where all that is written is a woman's name, over and over, and one night, he disappears for a time, and returns just as suddenly. As she grows older, she decides to follow him on a trip to a local theater, where she discovers the woman's name from the letter on a poster for the film currently playing. After the film, she tracks him down to a local café, where he is composing a letter to the female star of the film, a former lover who he would like to get reacquainted with. He receives a letter back, and soon afterwards, becomes curt, practically silent and emotionally distant, to the point that he seems cut off to the world.

The film's themes towards childhood innocence and lost loves are universal even as they appear bizarrely unique, and although there are a lot of odd details that are left hanging (her prospective admirer, who is a compulsive graffiti artist), they seem to enrich the specifics of this particular situation even as they enhance the general associative qualities of the story around them. The acting, from the Estrellas of both ages (Sonsoles Aranguren at 8, Iciar Bollain at 15) is pitch-perfect, and Omero Antonutti is impeccable, displaying an ability to put forth a wide range of emotions in a very select amount of movements and expressions, and whether he's lovingly essaying a letter to a past lover, or shutting the world out once his reply comes back, you may not always understand his motivations, but you get the sentiment, and you know exactly what he's going for, much in the way that a frowny face means 'sad', except that Antonutti has a range of about three inches on his face with which he brings forth this myriad of emotions.

The film's visuals have a wondrous, hypnotic lyricism to them, from the look to the style to the movement of the camera, something more impressive considering that the film is not all that stylistically obvious, there's nothing that makes you go, "Wow!", but it's there, and you feel it deep down in your soul. It's been too long since I've seen "The Spirit of the Beehive", but I seem to remember this quality being present there as well, and I liken it to the effect of "The Exorcist". There's nothing to make you SCREAM in the exorcist, they're no jump scares, no It Was Just a Cat moments, but the film has such a potent sense of overwhelming DREAD that it just crawls inside your skin and festers, to a glorious extent.

Now, this is not to say the film is without fault. The father's transition from "good dad who has a hang-up about an old relationship" to "full-on shut-in who hates everyone and never speaks to his family again" seemingly takes place within a matter of minutes (and that's FILM LIFE minutes, not just minutes of the movie), and the particulars of his former lover and their relationship are left frustratingly scant, and this doesn't seem like a situation where the act is all that matters, this could have been fleshed out to a more effect breadth, and although I do mostly understand the meaning of the finale, it doesn't make it any less jarringly sudden or unsatisfying. The fact that the film apparently ends only two-thirds of the way into the novel seems to support this conclusion. Also, almost all of the film is presented from the daughter's point of view, but there's several important chunks depicted from the father's perspective that, although informative from an expositional standpoint, seem to sort of reduce the delicate mystery and the effect it would have created had we stayed wholly with the girl.

The film is nowhere near as moving as the minor keys of "Beehive" were, but the film is captivating, engaging and never overstays its welcome (at a svelte 95 minutes), and is most definitely a worthwhile filmgoing experience that is worth hunting down and worth praying for the Criterion treatment for. Thanks, Vic, I can't wait to track down the other 33.3% of your filmography, because so far, you're 2-for-2.

{Grade: 8.25/10 (high B) / #13 of 1983}