The least that can be said about The Disenchantment is that it is surprising and that it is effective. Surprising because how to understand the attitude (courage?) of this family that shamelessly exposes their dirty laundry? And effective because the final sensation is powerfully devastating and decadent.
It brings to our mind Tolstoy's first sentence in Anna Karenina. The film is a clear attack on the traditional Francoist bourgeois family, more chilling than any shown by Chabrol, through the nothing exemplary case of the Panero family. The father a poet today quite forgotten, but in the times of the dictatorship of a certain reputation. The mother a girl from the upper classes in Madrid, somewhat vain and presumptuous, who discovers that life with the renowned poet is far from what she expected. We can imagine infidelities, subjugation, loneliness...
Of the three children, the eldest has had an inconsequential career as a poet, more pulling on his father's reputation than anything else, but he likes to think that he is someone in the cultural world of the time; the other, a cursed poet somewhat more remembered, is an unfortunate example of what drugs can do to human beings; the third is a spoiled good boy who tries to live as well as possible with what may be left from selling the family estate.
The three of them like to investigate Freudian backgrounds, appear cultured, attract attention, hate their father and criticize their brothers.
The director records a series of conversations with the mother and children, alternating their memories of the missing father and the quarrels between the members who survived the cataclysm.
Disenchantment tells us the story of a family that believed itself to be the center of the universe and suddenly finds itself without a job or benefit, very destitute, after the death of a father as prestigious as he is detested, forced to squander what remains of the family heritage to maintain a way of life to which they are accustomed and continue mostly idle and devoted to analysing their personal problems. We can even imagine that they would make money from this film.
But as in any attack on the bourgeois family, it seeks to universalize what is a particularly unfortunate example. Family like real hell.
Good use of Schubert's music and beautiful images of manor houses and Castilian lands. Rough black and white photography.
The end is desolate decadence.
