For this year, I have decided to concentrate on movies favourably appraised by the two guides I grew up with – Leslie Halliwell's and Leonard Maltin's – or were otherwise mentioned in a couple of polls ranking the top films of all time. With this in mind, of about a score of Saura titles in my possession and which I had opted to schedule for viewing on the occasion of his birthday, the number has been reduced to just 5 – and these are not necessarily among his more renowned or even intriguing efforts!
The film under review falls, to my mind, in the latter category – despite its having won the Jury Prize at Cannes. Having now watched it for myself, there is no doubt that COUSIN ANGELICA is indeed worthy of merit; however, I must also admit that it was rather heavy-going an experience for a number of reasons. First off, it seems to me that certain native film-makers are obsessed with the Spanish Civil War – since it regularly features in their work (as here), and yet the conflict eventually comes to have no real bearing on the central plot! In the same vein, there is a distinct whiff of anti-clericalism (including nightmarish visions of a worm-infested and stigmata-bearing nun) running through it but, again, no specific point is being made by this stance!
Incidentally, I wonder why such an ordinary title (which also misleadingly equates it with a contemporaneous sub-genre in Italian cinema!) was chosen for a film that is essentially so rich in subtext – relating to the impossible love affair at the heart of the narrative between the single protagonist and his unhappily married cousin – especially since several actors play multiple roles throughout while the hero remains the same, i.e. middle-aged, the entire time (even when supposed to be a child and, at one point, gets to see himself as he is imagining a meeting with his own long-dead parents)! Curiously enough, the end titles reveal that the film was dedicated to Charles and Oona Chaplin, the parents of Saura's then-companion (and frequent collaborator) Geraldine who, however, does not appear in this one...and I do wonder what the British comic made of the whole thing!
