Cría cuervos…

Decades before the critically acclaimed Pan’s Labyrinth elevated director Guillermo del Toro from “comic book movie guy” to “serious film maker,” Carlos Saura had already made a film dealing with the subjects of fascism and death as seen through the eyes of a young girl in Spain after the Civil War, and while Saura’s film lacks the visual flair that marks del Torro’s work, it has a maturity and depth that the former lacks. It is the haunting story not of the loss of innocence, but of an innocence that is forced to deal with a tragic reality that surrounds it, and subsequently becomes morbidly ambivalent towards these very “grownup” concepts. Young Ana, the middle sister to three orphaned girls, fantasizes about death as a way of getting closer to her deceased mother, and as a way of escaping the stifling life as the daughter of a late military man in Fascist Spain. The story paints a candid picture of childhood as “interminable, sad, full of fear, fear of the unknown,” but this picture is painted at times with moments of humor and affection. What this film lacks, however, is a cloying quality that most films about childhood have, which makes the sense of loss all the more real and haunting.