It is impossible that, today, a veteran spectator listens to Jeanette singing Why are you leaving? and the images of Cría cuervos, of Ana Torrent, of an era, of a prototypical Spanish family do not immediately come to mind. Cría cuervos was an emotional impact.
1976, the recent dictatorship, democracy still in its infancy and Carlos Saura closing with that everlasting film a cycle of flagship titles of the so-called New Spanish Cinema, which started after testing the ground with Los golfos (produced/sponsored by Pere Portabella, who detected in him a born talent) and Llanto por un bandit, with the black and white and brutal The Hunt (Silver Bear in Berlin: good accolade) and continued with Peppermint frappé, Stress is three, three, The Burrow, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Ana and the wolves and Cousin Angélica, a film that plays a similar role in the filmography of the Aragonese filmmaker to that of Wild Strawberries in Ingmar Bergman’s.
If he had finished his career there, Buñuel’s work would already be that of a giant of our cinema, at the level of Buñuel. But he still had four long decades of prolific, uninterrupted work left (he premiered his latest film, The Walls Talk, last Friday), and Saura had to reinvent himself, since critical and cryptic allegory, in opening times, no longer made sense and I would have ended up burying him. Although he would relapse into her in the very twilight Mama meets a hundred years (the grotesque sequel to Ana and the wolves), his trajectory took different paths.
Perhaps the most fertile is the dialogue between cinema and music, first through a trilogy rooted in Spanish culture (Bodas de sangre, Carmen and El amor brujo), and later in a series of stylized, creative, sometimes of experimental accent: Sevillanas, Flamenco, Tango, Iberia, Fados, Flamenco, flamenco or Jota de Saura. But he also excelled in comedy (also with music and a tragic background: Oh, Carmela!) and particularly in thriller: Shoot!, The 7th day or Hurry, hurry, a fundamental piece of quinquis cinema.
A work, finally, enormous, eclectic (there are many other films of interest, refractory to labels: Dulces horas, Los stilts, La noche oscura, etc.), with essential collaborators (Querejeta, Geraldine Chaplin, Pablo G. del Amo, Luis Cuadrado…), in which politically committed auteur (or “message”) cinema coexists in perfect balance with popular and commercial cinema for viewers of all conditions. A classic. A reference. And a teacher.