Los, Tempo!

Those folks who enjoyed "Gun Crazy" or "Badlands" or those who, like me, wondered if this artsy fartsy director would or could ever tell a direct, hard hitting story without any pretentious BS, should be most satisfied with this bleak tale of juvies in Madrid set in the days when Francoism was yielding, ever so slowly, to Democracy.

It has been criticized for "glorifying" the four young sociopaths but I just don't see it. I mean, unless they are holding up banks or burning cars or killing people the quartet are half dead most of the time and, when they do speak, what they have to say tends toward the extremely banal and, though they are successful in their left handed endeavors for a while, three of the four meet decidedly unromantic, violent ends while the fourth is seen at film's end walking into darkness where I doubt if even youthful Spanish audiences in 1981 wished to follow her.

Perhaps it was Saura's jaundiced view of Spanish society, with its high corruption quotient and trigger happy, authoritarian cops a reminder that ol Francisco F wasn't that far in the rear view mirror, that caused film critics to think that he was making his destructive, chaotic teens heroes. But in this film there are no heroes, anti or otherwise. Consequently, this viewer felt very little pity for them as they met their depressing fates. Plenty of admiration for the four actors who portrayed them, though, especially when you consider that two were not professional thesps but rather actual prisoners on day release. A minus.