Over his long career, but particularly in the ‘70s, ‘80s & ‘90s, Carlos Saura found international success with an anodyne approach to high Spanish culture. Meticulously made, beautifully produced, you wouldn’t call it tourist trap cinema, more State-sponsored exhibit, destined as centerpiece at some putative World’s Fair Spanish Pavilion. Here, Manuel de Falla's highly-charged half-hour concert piece for orchestra & mezzo-soprano EL AMOR BRUJO gets the treatment, expanded into a feature-length dance work with bits of dialog & added gypsy flamenco turns.* Betrothed as children, now grown into their wedding day, bride & groom come up against long-time/third-wheel male suitor. (Plus short-time female third-wheel new to the story.) Murder; ghostly haunting; pas de quatre recoupling; dawn of a new day resolution. Shot on a stylized junkyard shanty town, Saura briefly mines the real possibilities of de Falla’s ravishing music in a group community dance (‘Ritual Fire Dance’), but otherwise holds to the bus tour schedule.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Working from frankly lesser material (second-tier/dialog-free French theatrical), Ettore Scola shows how to do something along these lines in LE BAL/’83.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Reconceived in 1925 by de Falla from his flop 1914 original (a third longer, with cabaret singer, chamber orchestra, dialog), the new version caught on immediately, as a ‘ballet pantomime’ or concert piece, with full orchestra, mezzo-soprano and no dialog. Saura’s expansion apparently taken from the better known 1925 edition. Ernest Ansermet’s early stereo classic with Marina de Gabaráin from 1955 has long been the ‘go-to’ recording.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: If you ever wondered what Adrien Brody would look like as a fiery flamenco dancer, here’s your chance. (see poster)
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