Noces de sang

As I watched the movie Bodas de sangre, I was completely disturbed. Although I like the Flamenco and appreciated how Carlos Saura, the director, incorporated it into the movie I wonder where some of the important themes went. The movie shows the emotions of the characters through the Flamenco however it fails to touch on some of the most significant ideas of the play. This movie lacks the themes that made the play so compelling. For instance, the importance of virginity, la honra, is totally forgotten. We don't see the mother's disappointment with her son's choice of a wife because the girlfriend had another boyfriend. Money and the desire for land are ignored as well as the significance of destiny. The viewer never understands the importance of destiny in regards to Leonardo and the groom. Also, the viewer cannot see that the characters in the book are nameless except for Leonardo. Maybe if I had not read the play before watching Bodas de sangre I wouldn't have been so disappointed. I thought that the Flamenco was a useful tool for showing emotion but couldn't carry the entire movie.

I had found Saura's last film, TANGO, trite and insulting, but I decided to give him another chance, in deference to his reputation. I needn't have bothered. Whatever his talent as a chronicler of character under oppression, he has no ability to film dance. He has no faith in dance's own expressive tropes, so he must impose meaning on them. He films in a flat, leaden style, which never allows the dance to come to life.

Like TANGO, Saura foregrounds a self-reflexivity on the film. This time, however, it is used relatively intelligently. There is a pretence of documentary as we watch 'famed' choreographer Antonio Gades prepare for his flamenco adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding. We see the preparations of the dancers, the (tedious) warm ups, the donning of costumes.

None of this is gratuitous (although the lingering on the undressing female dancers might be), and is infinitely preferable to the fictional ponderings of TANGO. The opening credits roll over a sepia photograph of the cast, mimicking the period in which the play was set. Lorca was, of course, a famous leftist, murdered by Fascists in the Civil War, and this is a film, made only a few years after Franco's death, that attempts to come to terms with Spanish history. The lengthy process of rehearsal emphasises the process of becoming, suggesting that history is not the monolithic entity the Right would like it to be, but a fluid interpretive searching, grasping, for the truth. The repeated gazing into mirrors links this national quest with an examination of the self. And yet Old Spain is not so quickly vanquished - one dancer hangs religious pictures on her mirror.

So, the dance is made to carry a lot of baggage. We are not given the actual performance, but a dress rehearsal, continuing the idea of becoming, as if to offer a fixed definitive version would be to concede to the enemy. This austere restriction to one bare space, without sets, without any help from Saura, means that the dancing has to be spectacular for the film to succeed. It is not, being rather conservative, and blindingly obvious and literal, the dance equivalent of dialogue sung in a Lloyd-Webber musical. Every gesture is laboriously spelt out; the viewer is credited with no intelligence.

It is totally inadequate to the play's politics, and the pared down approach means we lose its febrile, exhilirating excess. The critique of machismo and the death wish, applied to Spanish culture as a whole, is still there, but the climactic stand-off, while comparitively inventive, is more silly than cathartic, like Cavalliera Rusticana with the sound down. It is odd that a film so critical of the macho ethic should be so...macho.

As with TANGO, any effect the film has lies in the music, which, especially in the mariachi wedding sequence, provides the drama and beauty absent from the filming itself.

¨Bodas de sangre¨ or ¨Blood Wedding¨ is one of the greatest and most beautiful Lorca dramas about life, love, passion, customs and gypsies. A team of dancers puts Lorca's 'Blood Wedding' on stage, the tragic play about a man (Antonio Gades) who is still in love with his ex-girlfriend (Cristina Hoyos), and tries to reunite with her, despite the planned wedding to her groom (Juan Antonio Jiménez), about to get married.

Lorca's drama is transformed into flamenco dance, a film with almost no dialogues where the entire plot is carried out through dance, choreography and staging. At the end of his long collaboration with the producer Elias Querejeta, which extends over 15 years and 13 films, director Saura shoots a ballet with choreography by Antonio Gades, based on the work of the same name by Garcia Lorca and music by Emilio de Diego for the producer Emilio Piedra. Its not excessive length makes Saura include quasi-documentary footage about the preparation of the dancers in order to achieve a minimum running time that allows its commercial exploitation. In the end, the film is 72 minutes long.

Although ¨Bodas de sangre¨ is shot in a poor and unique set, the film is still interesting due to the magic that the dancers give off while they are dancing the wonderful flamenco pieces, along with the exciting background music. Furthermore , including some songs: ¨La nana¨ performed by Marisol (at the time Gades's wife with whom she played various movies) and ¨Ay, mi sombrero¨ performed by Pepe Blanco .The main interest is that 'Blood Wedding' (1981) based on the homonymous work by Federico Garcia Lorca was the first film in the trilogy that has brought so much success to its director and which is completed by 'Carmen' (1983) and 'El amor Brujo' (1986). The result had a great resonance, even more internationally than nationally; it represents the launch of a first-class dancer, Cristina Hoyos, and confirms that Gades is as good a dancer and choreographer as he is a bad actor.

That's why after the success of the musical rehearsal ¨Bodas de Sangre¨ (Blood Wedding) (1981) and before filming ¨El Amor Brujo¨ (1986) with music by Manuel de Falla, the producer Emiliano Piedra, who accepted the rights to George Bizet's opera were the public domain, convinced director Carlos Saura and the dancers Antonio Gades and Cristina Hoyos to do the best of his three musicals: ¨Carmen¨. Due to the hit of the film, they continued with a successful theatrical version, directed jointly by Gades and Saura, which the dancer's company performed throughout the world with a large and fervent audience that followed the performances.

¨Bodas de sangre¨ was directed with a striking visual sense and very well performed with the wonderful dances. So it's definitely a more cultured affair than most of the Spanish movies. It is fundamentally a tragic melodrama with ballet scenes, that's why it is musically riveting , it is almost, also , perfect and laced with adequate photography by Teo Escamilla , particularly shown on the spectacular and sensitive dancing set pieces. I was able to enjoy many of the visual elements, in fact this one results to be the quintaessential Dance film , featuring brilliant and frenetic choreography and embellished thanks to its chromatic aesthetic and a high-caliber Flamenco dance. Adding sensual re-creations of love , passion , betrayal and jealousy .

The work is distinctively Andalusian in character as well dances and songs. The music contains moments of remarkable beauty and originality ; adding the guitar tones of notorious andalusian artists. The great trio starring is formed by splendid dancers : Antonio Gades , Cristina Hoyos and Juan Antonio Jiménez, they are really fabulous . This splendid motion picture was compellingly directed by Carlos Saura.

The human body uses the dance language to tell the simple story of damned love. The ballet, far from being a tool incidental to communication, carries within itself a whole body of assumptions about love and death, about sin and punishment.

The story line is simple. A bride elopes with her lover in the very day of her wedding. The groom follows the two lovers, and a knife fight takes place. The rivals stab each other and the only wedding that takes place is that one knotting their destinies together in death. A blood wedding.

Besides from the unearthly beauty of the dance spilling out of the dancers bodies on the Flamenco rhythm, the film goes a long way toward shaping and determining the kind of thoughts one is able to have on the controversial topic of sinful love.

How can a film be so simple, and yet so beaultiful? It's easy to see that the film must has costed almost nothing, and it's very very simple: just shows a dance group showing it's art. But the impressive corporal and facial expressions, the intense dance and all emotions envolved, the ones in the tragic story and the ones in the real story of the dancers, makes this film a simple work of art. Simple as a movie, but art as it is.