When we talk about Carlos Saura, it’s the song of Breeding ravens, “Porque te vas”, which immediately comes to mind. It is with this dark and suffocating film – whose soundtrack was signed by Federico Mompou, one of the great Spanish composers of the XXe century – that the Spanish filmmaker, who died on Friday February 10 at the age of 91, had won international notoriety, winning the grand jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976 and the César for best foreign film the following year. This story of a ten-year-old girl, Ana, who takes refuge in her imagination and her dreams to find her dead mother, played by Geraldine Chaplin, was also a powerful metaphor for Franco’s Spain and its confinement.
A morbid atmosphere pervades his early films and goes back to a childhood marked by the Spanish Civil War. Born in 1932 in Huesca into a Republican family – his mother was a concert pianist and his father a lawyer – he received a rather liberal education before being separated from his parents at the end of the war and entrusted to a grandmother and aunts on the contrary very conservative. From this painful experience, he will draw several films on the theme of the family which are as many criticisms of the hypocrisy of the society of the time.
At the sources of the arts
First a photographer, he trained in directing at the Institute for Cinematographic Research and Studies, from which he graduated in 1957. Following a few attempts that he himself considered unsatisfactory, he stood out in 1966 with a documentary on the destitute, The hunt, who won a Silver Bear in Berlin. The successes of Breeding ravens and of Cousin Angelique, which establish him as a great filmmaker of intimacy and painful memory. After the fall of Francoism, he turned to lighter films with Mom turns 100 or Live fast!
In the last part of his life, Carlos Saura completely immersed himself in the world of music and dance. He first approaches it with Carmen, released in 1983: in a flamenco troupe, a choreographer, camped by the aristocratic and ascetic Antonio Gades, falls in love with the dancer (Laura del Sol) who embodies the fatal Gypsy imagined by Prosper Mérimée. Guitarist Paco de Lucía and…Georges Bizet confront their respective interpretations of the deadly passion between two beings who tear each other apart.
He continues this exploration with Sevillanas (1992), Flamenco (1995), then Tango (1998), nominated for an Oscar in the category of best foreign film. In Don Giovanni (2010), the director focuses on the librettist of Mozart’s brilliant opera, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Few filmmakers have drawn as much as Carlos Saura from the sources of the arts and staged the world of entertainment.