Anna and the Wolves

A sometimes powerful, sometimes silly (the levitation scene) and always heavy political allegory. And I do mean allegory. You literally cannot move without bumping into a character/symbol and as usually occurs when humans stand for abstractions like The Military, The Church, or Moral Squalor, they lose whatever quirks and contradictions make them interestingly human and instead, as happens here, become stiff, posturing caricatures.

I will say, however, that director Carlos Saura's idea of wrapping his condemnation of Francoist Spain in a feminist package, so to speak, where hatred of and desire to dominate women is the engine that drives the whole corrupt enterprise, is an inspired one and gives this film a force that cannot be denied, so that the ending is more shattering than simply over the top. And Geraldine Chaplin's alternately playful and scornful performance as the embodiment of Threatening Womanhood is, in my opinion, the best thing she's done. Give it a B.

The young but traveled Ana (Geraldine Chaplin) arrives in a manor in the countryside of Spain to work as nanny of three girls and finds a dysfunctional family: the matriarch (Rafaela Aparicio) is a sick old woman obsessed by death and having constant nervous breakdown; her son José (José María Prada) was raised dressing girl's clothes until his First Communion and is obsessed by military clothes and stuffs; Juan (José Vivó), the father of the three girls, is a pervert since his childhood that writes pornographic letters to Ana; his wife Luchy (Charo Soriano) has suicidal tendencies; and the mystic and religious eremite Fernando(Fernando Fernán Gómez), who was inflicted to flagellation in his childhood, lives recluse in a cave. The presence of Ana disturbs the three brothers with tragic consequences.

In the 70's, "Ana y los Lobos" was very successful in Brazil and one of my favorite movies of my adolescence. This film is actually a political allegory of Franco's dictatorship in Spain, with the mother and the three brothers representing the Spanish society of those times. The omnipotent mother is the old Spain; the oppressive José represents the authoritarianism of the military government of Franco; Juan the repressed sexuality and Fernando the Catholic Church. The story is bizarre with a weird atmosphere and characters and top-notch performances, with Geraldine Chaplin extremely beautiful and sexy. The DVD released in Brazil by the Brazilian distributor Platina Filmes is actually a VHS converted to DVD, with low-quality of image. The worst is the unforgivable and shameful mistake in the subtitles in Portuguese that wrongly translates, for example, "seho" (seal, in English) as cello, misleading in a non-sense way the viewer that can not understand Spanish. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Ana e os Lobos" ("Ana and the Wolves")

Geraldine Chaplin goes to a Spanish home to tutor two small, motherless girls, and finds a bunch of maniacs; the grandmother is subject to rages and fits; one brother writes her anonymous pornographic letters; another dresses in antique military uniforms and interrogates her; the third has whitewashed a cave on the property and moved in to try to attain spiritual perfection. As the three men lust for her, Miss Chaplin uses the opportunity to observe and torment them.

Commenters claim there is a satire of Franco's Spain lurking behind the bizarre situations. Perhaps. Miss Chaplin's motives remain obscure to me. Sometimes she seems the amused observer, sometimes the bewildered participant. If there was an attempt at satire, it was sufficiently subtle that the censors, always on the lookout for such things, didn't notice it.

That's stay clear that Carlos Saura's picture is hard subject to savour, he puts several symbolism to attack Franco's dictatorship, sounds weird to some tastes, the beginning is slow pace, sometimes really boring, many excess on some sequences, a typical art movie, the most interesting characters are the old brother with his odd collection of the military uniform and the young brother that opt to living in a cave praying in full abstinence of food or sex, all others waive any additional comments, an overlong picture that bother me mostly, the final scene is incredible subjective and highly violent, anyway and nasty experience at first look, wasn't allow to all tastes indeed, still, totally restored Saura's Box-Set containing six pictures with original audio !!!

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First watch: 2019 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7

Another allegorical and surrealist tale typical of its director serves as a biting criticism of Franco-ruled Spain, at times irritating and disturbing and in the end devastating.