Cousin Angélica was Saura's first real success, favored by the riots and scandals caused by its premiere. Taking up the theme and allegorical style of The Garden of Earthly Delights, here Saura makes his most explicitly political film.
From The Garden of Delights, he recovers several actors, first of all his main actor, a José Luis López Vázquez who tried to prove acting skills that went far beyond the mostly silly comedies (but let's not forget his collaborations with Ferreri or García Berlanga with very critical and no nonsense scripts by Azcona) that abounded so much in Spanish commercial cinema of the sixties and seventies.
There are cinephile winks to this previous film (for example in a scene when the protagonist do not choose the green tie), very much to the director's sometimes crude and sufficient taste.
Structurally, it is a complex film, where the use of the same girl to play the two Angélicas, as well as López Vázquez to play the adult and child Luis, allow Saura interesting temporal transitions, within a clear desire to show undeniable virtuosity in adapting to the cinematographic medium the modernist innovations in this aspect that in the literary field had been resurrected and exploited with absolute genius by the great authors of the Latin American Boom (Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Donoso...) and were also in vogue among some Spanish avant-garde writers of the time (the Goytisolo or Marsé for example).
What hinders La prima Angélica, as in general all the work of this epoc of the director, is the insistence on the symbolic, the allegory, in a sufficient and pedantic tone that it transmits to its characters, putting in their mouths an artificial language and making them assume poses of unbearable affectation.
Saura has an undoubted (but we are not sure if always welcome) talent for transmitting the transcendent content of a scene, and in his best moments he can masterfully make both planes coexist, for example, the last scene of the film (partly also because of this privileged position in the narrative), where various decisions by the director (among them the use of López Vázquez as a young Luisito) add layers of meaning to the basic content of the scene, and we are no longer alone in the unjust and cruel punishment of the child by his uncle, nor in the allegorical meaning of the revenge of the national side on the republicans after the war, but also and perhaps above all the unhealed wounds, the punishment and the revenge experienced, even unconsciosly, day after day by the protagonist in his adult life.
López Vázquez, as in The Garden of Delights, finds himself with a difficult role that could be a poisoned gift. As a child it can be moving, for example in that first scene with the parents on the road to Segovia, but mostly it is, not entirely intentionally we fear, just laughable. Faced with the often bombastic and affected phrases that Saura puts in his mouth (that awful explanation about Proust!), López Vázquez, more accustomed to comedy, seems only able to face them with a pedantic tone of a ridiculous little man. His performance is alternately brilliant and ridiculous, though frankly I can't imagine any other actor who could pull off the role more convincingly.
In any case, Saura's decision not to shoot with a child Luis, but to make the adult Luis coexist in two temporary spaces (no longer, as in Bergman's Smultronstället only as a witness, but interacting with the rest of the characters, as in Fellini's 81/2), is undoubtedly one of the greatest ideas of the film (and of great psychological truth it seems to me), but very risky in its execution and with irregular results.
As for the political content of the film, naturally the right-wing characters, representing an entire ideology, are shown as an example of cruelty, cowardice, insensitivity, selfishness and hypocrisy. But by identifying the cruelty of the regime with the human values of the people who fought in that side, he introduced a Manichean vision that unfortunately had as much presence in post-dictatorship cinema as the opposite position had in the terrible 1940s.
And finally, after an hour, the film enters a major bump, inevitable in the face of so much insistent symbology that does not include new developments and whose scope is already completely exhausted, but even so it picks up pace in the last scenes and the ending is certainly achieved.
Altogether, one of Saura's great titles, with the undoubted virtues, but the obvious general defects (artificiality, pedantry, pomposity), at this stage of his work, which should be seen at least for the historical importance of the film and for being risky and innovative both conceptually and formally.
