Gli egoisti

Breaking the Rules

Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist)

The Formation of a Unique Hybrid of Spanish Cinema

1955. At the height of the cold war, almost twenty years under the Franco regime, Spain, a country fiercely divided by poverty and societal division prepares with the support of the United States, to enter into the United Nations. American investors arrive in Spain for the chance to buy into the developing Spanish economy. Meanwhile on a cold winter's day, dusk is falling and the Sun's dying rays hit the highway. Enrique Arízaga cycles past and off into the outlying horizon. Almost as soon as he has gone out of sight, a screeching of brakes is heard in the distance and a black car slams to a halt around the bend; the cricket chirps. A man jumps out and rushes over. On observing the cyclist is still breathing, he calls over to the woman, inside the car. She gets out and calls back over to him. The woman beckons him again to desert the scene of the accident, leaving the cyclist to die. The car moves off again disappearing towards Madrid.

In the immediacy of its establishing sequence, Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) already outlines the foundations and circumstances behind the film's plot. An adulterous couple, Juan (Alberto Closas) and María José (Lucia Bosè) run down a cyclist on their way back to Madrid after a clandestine meeting in the outskirts. Rather than call for help the couple, fearful of the discovery of their adulterous relationship, flee the scene of the accident. Bardem's film focuses on the tribulations and strains on the characters' relationship from that point onwards and the lengths they go to keep their crimes of adultery and murder under cover.

Spanish director Juan Antonio Bardem (1922-2002) explored and made use of a variety of genres within his early career. In Esa pareja feliz (1951) and ¡Bienvenido Mr Marshall! (1953), both joint ventures with contemporary Luis García Berlanga, Bardem through the conventions of comedy was able to develop a structure of parody and political satire. In Cómicos (1954), Bardem was heavily influenced by the genre of Hollywood melodrama, in particular that of films such as All About Eve (1950), a convention he would continue to develop throughout later films including Calle Mayor (1956).

Throughout Muerte de un ciclista Bardem develops a compound of contrasting style and genre to represent key issues within Spanish society. Prominent themes and genres within the film include film noir and the femme fatale mould, the Hitchcock suspense thriller, Italian neo-realism and soviet montage. Bardem uses these contrasting elements directly after one another in order to create what Marsha Kinder refers to as a 'rupture' within the centrality of the plot of the Hollywood melodrama. In the same way as the unnatural cutting and contrasting imagery Bardem uses, the film is able to ideologically expose corrupt and immoral elements of the Franco regime. The focus of this essay is to explore and to investigate these various elements and analyse the way in which they come together in forming a hybrid that is unique within the history of Spanish cinema.

Through the usage of a variety of contrasting elements and genre Bardem is able to ideologically expose the corrupt elements of the Franco regime. Today Muerte de un ciclista stands as a critique of the conformist values that it ridicules and attempts to tear apart. It breaks all the rules and shows the power of cinema to revolutionise daily life. In the same way as Bardem's characters of María José who breaks the conformist gender rules of Francoist Spain, Matilde who rebels against the institutional system and Juan who goes against the corruption and falseness of his class background, so too does Muerte de un ciclista rebel both by taking a stand against the corrupt Franco regime and also by breaking the rules of mainstream conventional cinema in order to present something vitally fresh and unique in Spanish film. Alfred Hitchcock once noted that it is important to know the limits of commercial cinema. Bardem is able to successfully use a clash of genre to stretch the viewer close to an absolute limit and is subsequently able to breakdown and underline the key political issues surrounding contemporary Spanish society. In the same way as the moral courage that the character of Juan is able to attain, Bardem seeks to signify the same moral fibre that the Spanish regime strove to repress. Like the broken window imagery that Bardem puts forward towards the end of the film, so too does a hole within the melodramatic centrality serve as a central element within the film's plot in order to be clashed with and torn apart. It is through this hybrid and "rupture" of genre that Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista has been able to create a quintessential feat in Spanish cinema.

Harrison Cohen

"What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?" – Lady Macbeth

This and his next film 'Calle Mayor' established Juan Antonio Bardem as one of the world's leading filmmakers although as a Communist his far from complimentary view of those who had enriched themselves under Franco's regime was hardly likely to endear him to the authorities. He was in fact arrested whilst filming 'Calle Mayor' and was still in prison when 'Muerte de un Ciclista' won the International Film Critics' Award at Cannes.

Thematically it is inspired by Tolstoy's 'Resurrection' and filmically shows the influence of Antonioni's 'Cronaca di un amore'. Indeed Francois Truffaut, never one to mince his words, accused Bardem of plagiarism. Granted, there are what one critic has referred to as 'reinventions of Antonioni settings' but for this viewer at any rate these would probably not have occurred to me had they not been pointed out and certainly did not lessen my appreciation of Bardem's film.

The main link of course is the presence in both films of the charismatic Lucia Bosé, playing on both occasions an adulterous wife. Her lover here is well played by Alberto Closas but his character's crisis of conscience and moralisings somehow lack conviction. As the idealistic Matilde the lovely Bruna Corra provides a counterpoint to the self-obsessed Maria of Bosé. It is however the Uruguayan character actor Carlos Casaravilla who registers most strongly as a 'camp' art critic whose bitterness conceals a painful loneliness.

What strikes one most about the film is its technical brilliance. Atmospherically shot by Alfredo Fraile, the framing, compositions and use of close-ups are excellent and with the assistance of Margarita Orchoa, the only editor with whom Bardem worked until her death in the mid-sixties, there is an extremely effective use of cross-cutting and abrupt jump cuts. There is alas a brief shot of the cameraman's hand in the back of Maria's car and one is surprised that the director allowed it to remain.

He was obliged to cut the film from 91 to 88 minutes and one is intrigued as to what those three minutes contained. Needless to say censorship of the time required Maria to be punished for her crime and the ending, albeit highly melodramatic, is well handled and supremely ironic.

Despite being derivative in parts, this remains a landmark in post Civil War Spanish cinema and it is to be lamented that much of this courageous artiste's subsequent work was affected by government control.

It's a great premise, and director Juan Antonio Bardem plunges us immediately into the drama of a pair of lovers who accidentally hit a bicyclist on a deserted road and then just leave him to die. As the story unfolds, we find out more these people and the setting itself. The man (Alberto Closas) is a math professor who got his job through his powerful brother-in-law, and the woman (Lucia Bosè) has been his lover since before the Spanish Civil War, but who left him while he was off fighting it in order to marry into wealth and a higher social standing. Both are thus privileged, but somewhat morally compromised even before the accident. By contrast, the victim is from a much more humble background, which we see when the professor tries to visit his widow. Still later, we find that the place where the accident occurred, on a road through a barren landscape, was also where the professor had been fighting in the war, and there is clearly meaning in that fact. (As an aside, the landscape may remind you of the 1973 Spanish film 'The Spirit of the Beehive', and there is something eerie and sad about these films made under authoritarian rule that seem to show the devastation of the spirit via this type of scenery.)

The pair are threatened when a pianist/art critic (Carlos Casaravilla) begins making oblique comments hinting that he knows something, and then later when the pair disagree about whether to admit what they've done or not. This tension is strong in the beginning, but falters a bit with an unnecessary subplot involving one of the professor's students, as well as in becoming a bit too much of a morality tale. It's also pretty clear what the art critic knows, but the pretense for ambiguity is carried on a little too long, and this interesting subplot and character aren't taken advantage of in better ways. It picks up towards the end though, with Bosè delivering some great moments through the coolness of her eyes, and a dramatic finish.

The film makes social points in showing how far the wealthy will go to obtain or maintain their position, and you can see in it political commentary too. After the war, society is stratified in unfair ways, with a big gap between the powerful and the poor, and indeed, the powerful can sometimes believe they are above the law. The scene of the crime being near a battlefield seems to mean that this horrifying but relatively small act is a microcosm of much larger crimes having been committed against Spain, or something along those lines. Seen from that perspective, perhaps the ending is less the natural conclusion of a morality tale, and more a subversive message, which was interesting to think about. It's when I consider these aspects and the courage it took for Bardem to make films like this under Franco that I liked 'Death of a Cyclist' best. As just a drama alone, it's probably just average, but it could be rated higher because of this context.

Juan Antonio Bardem was a pioneer in the not too thriving film industry in Franco's Spain and "Death of a cyclist" is his most well known picture. Today Spanish directors as Pedro Almodovar and Alejandro Amenabar are known worldwide, as is the nephew of Juan Antonio, the famous actor Javier Bardem.

The context of the film is an accident in which a car collides with a bycicle. Inside the car there are a man and a woman having an extramarital relationship. To keep their relationship secret, they don't call for help and the cyclist dies. A little while later someone tries to blackmail them, because "he knows something".

From that moment on the film takes on a guilt and penitence character. The central theme of the film is that the penitence that the man experiences is totally different from the penitence of the woman.

The man feels the guilt inside. The question if the widow of the death cyclist is left behind well cared for torments him and he tries to gather information about this question.

For the woman her quilt is more of an external nature. She sees her guilt as a threat to her luxury life. A life in which her older husband brings in money and her younger lover brings in pleasure. As long as the knowledge of the accident is limited to herself the threat shall not materialize. She goes at great length to find out what the blackmailer exactly knows. Knows he only about her extramarital relationship or also about the traffic accident?

In the opening scene we see the two lovers together. In the rest of the film we see them mostly apart. Through smart editing the director stresses the different ways the two main characters are handling their common guilt.

This movie started well enough. With the death of a cyclist.

Man gets out of the car, horrified. Woman gets out and tells him they should get going, forget the cyclist. Cyclist dies. Couple feels guilty.

So far, so good. I thought I was seeing a first-class psychological thriller.

Then we meet the piano-playing weasel, Rafa. Who seems to know what happened and is holding it over the couple.

If the movie had continued on that path, we might have had a noir worth talking about.

Sadly, Commie Bardem must have used the rushes from the first part of the film to convince dictator Franco's henchmen to greenlight the film. Because it soon descends into a polemic about class. A very, very steep descent.

I mean, does anybody really care about Matilde the math student?

It's ends up being a lot of yackety-yacking and whispering in discreet corners of rooms. Stuck in the mud of its own thin premise.

I am good with the ending. It's how Bardem got there that's the problem.