Almost like an echo of the past; almost like an echo of `Los Santos Inocentes' (1984); with careful deliberation Giménez Rico sought to transpose Miguel Delibe's novel into a filmed story; and that in itself is the problem. Rather than a classic story line, both the book and the film should be seen from an attitude in which you are observing a disconnected series of events depicting simple country people's lives in Spain in 1956; that the whole may have some sequential relationship is of secondary importance. There is nothing invented in Delibe's imagination: in those times, in backward Franco-owned Spain people DID kill pigs in the way seen in the film; people DID eat rats to survive hunger; people DID live in caves up in the hills as they had nowhere else
. People DID pray for it to rain, and DID fire rockets into the sky so that it would not rain so much.
But neither the book nor the film exist simply to horrify modern easy-living cinema-goers; Miguel Delibes, one of the three best and most respected novelists in Spain today, who also participated in writing the script, writes about his native Castilia, the cradle of Spanish civilisation, but always as a rural writer. His novels reflect the kind of people who lived in those small towns and little villages scattered around the high plateaux of the interior of Spain, far from the noisy mobs of tourists; his novels reflect their fears, loves, beliefs, senses of honour and loyalty, and of course the ever-present distrust and envy.
If, then, you try to watch the film under these precepts, appreciating each scene almost as a little story in itself, as an isolated experience, through which runs loosely a thread which vaguely connects the whole work, you will probably accept the film for what it is: a brilliantly carried out adaptation, beautifully filmed by Teo Escamilla in the province of Palencia. Some of the scenes of houses and streets were a bit out of place as a lot of cement laying and new roofs have been laid since 1956. However, you can see the wide open spaces around such villages as Valdecabañas de Cerrato, to the east of Palencia. José Cáride and Álvaro Monje in the central rôles play convincing parts: the stubborn old father who refuses to abandon his cave, and El Nini who interprets nature and the weather for the villagers, who ably assist them in their lesser parts in the film.
This is not a film which starts in one place and finishes in another; it is not even a film which goes through a logical series of actions; `Las Ratas' only depicts a series of rural sequences, peopled by peasants: simply a visual poem through which a discerning cinema-goer may just glimpse and capture a little of what mid-fifties life was like in Spain.
However, I fear that for many people including modern Spanish audiences who shun their own past, preferring to park it conveniently outside their selective memories this film may prove to be somewhat inexplicable, incomprehensible. You may also like to see my notes in `La Lengua de las Mariposas' (1999).
