The bullfighter Antonio Bienvenida once told the filmmaker Jaime de Armiñán that he never bullied for the people who filled the square. The director adapted that way of seeing life: “A film is for oneself. If you work with the idea of ??doing something commercial, you fall into a trap”, said the film director, who died on Tuesday in Madrid at the age of 97 after suffering a long illness.
Despite that thesis, Armiñán’s cinema was very popular. Some of his films, such as The Love of Captain Brando, led the Spanish box office, and three of his films – Mi querida señorita, El nido managed to be nominated for the Oscar for the best spoken word film not english Armiñán also managed to succeed in television, where he had started his career, with series such as Juncal, about a bullfighter retired from swimming.
Born in Madrid in 1927 into a family of artists, the filmmaker’s childhood was marked by the Civil War. In 1994 he published a kind of memoir, Diario en blanco en negro, in which he inserted passages from the story and other memories of his life, such as the resignation of his mother, who was forced to leave the theater to family demands.
Armiñán studied law and then began working as a columnist. He forged a career in television in the late fifties which he combined with tasks as a screenwriter for other directors. Until in 1969 he made his directorial debut with Carola de día, Carola de noche, Marisol’s first film as an adult. The public turned its back on the film, but Armiñán knew that his place was behind the cameras.
Time proved that he was not wrong. Two years later he released Mi querida señorita, a film between drama and comedy that tackles a very advanced subject for the time: transsexuality. José Luis López Vázquez, in a state of grace, plays Adela, a woman who lives in a nondescript way in a provincial town. To the boredom is added the strangeness that he feels, partly because of his physique, he grows a beard; partly because of his feelings, he likes his domestic worker, played by Julieta Serrano. Over time and after medical treatment, he discovers that he is actually a man.
Adela’s love for her worker was an impossible love, something very present in Armiñán’s cinema. In The Love of Captain Brando, the director explored the impossible relationship between a teacher, played by Ana Belén, and her 13-year-old student. The film, shot in 1974 at the end of the Franco regime, also traced the eternal affair of the Civil War through the character of Fernando Fernán Gómez, a republican returning home after living in exile for almost 40 years.
Fernán Gómez, López Vázquez, Paco Rabal, Fernando Rey, Concha Velasco… The great actors of Spanish cinema starred in many of Armiñán’s films, which gave his cinema notoriety. It was a mutual favor, because many of them achieved international recognition thanks to the roles offered to them by the director.
There were many marginalized characters for whom the filmmaker felt a predilection: “Marginal beings are much more interesting than normal ones. Dramatically and psychologically, they offer great narrative possibilities”, he explained in an interview given to La Vanguardia in 1986 on the occasion of the premiere in Barcelona of La hora bruja.
The director wrote the script for this film in Sitges when he was on the jury of the fantasy film festival. He had asked for the mornings off to rework the script about a couple, Paco Rabal and Concha Velasco, who tour the towns offering magic shows. “By placing the characters in a realistic environment that at the same time has a lot of magic, there is more richness”. Rabal and Velasco won the interpretation awards at the Seminci.
Armiñán’s cinema remained on the billboard during the eighties. The director then returned to television to direct highly successful series such as Juncal (1988) or Una gloria nacional (1993), both starring Paco Rabal. It also featured some interesting film titles such as El palomo cojo (1995). He shot his last film, 14, Fabian Road, in 2008, with Ana Torrent and Ángela Molina.
In recent years he has been away from public life due to his illness, but Armiñán leaves his film as a legacy, a reflection of a time in Spain’s history and the idiosyncrasy of the Spanish language.
