The key to grasping Carlos Saura’s sad, beautifully crafted although somewhat arid Antonieta is to grasp, first, that its protagonist is not, as one might think, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, an actual Mexican writer who committed suicide inside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1931, but instead Anna, the French woman writing about her a half-century […]
Tag Archives: Carlos Saura/Grunes
“I am afraid of losing you,” flamenco director Antonio tells the young, strikingly beautiful woman who has become his lover during rehearsals of his adaptation of Bizet’s opera Carmen, in which he plays Don José to her Carmen. The young dancer’s name also is Carmen. Wiry and weather-beaten, Antonio is not so young; in his […]
The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Since the nineteenth century, the wistful, melancholy fados of Portugal have been a tradition of music—sung, danced, performed by […]
They were countrymen, both from Aragón; Carlos Saura considers himself Luis Buñuel’s disciple. Perhaps Saura’s masterpiece, Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón, which Saura wrote with Agustín Sánchez Vidal, whose documentary A propósito de Buñuel (2000) had investigated Buñuel’s Surrealism and atheism, is an attempt to imagine Buñuel alive again (nearly twenty years after […]
Carlos Saura’s The Garden of Delights (1970) and Raise Ravens (1975) are both political allegories about Franco’s Spain, and at least the later film is brilliant. The earlier one is also commendable, but I do not feel the same way about Saura’s ¡Ay, Carmela!, which takes place during the Spanish Civil War that brought the […]
Dennis Grunes 