(81b is Lawrence of Arabia, a movie that I have already seen, and you have too. It’s pretty good? Certainly better than British Beatle-mania.)

So this is a Spanish movie, filmed during the later years of the Franco regime, and set in the early years of it. It focuses on a well-off family in a rural town. The dad keeps bees, the mom writes secret letters to a lover(?), and the two young daughters see the Boris Karloff “Frankenstein” movie, and then run all over the countryside unsupervised, spinning tales of ghost Frankensteins[1] and so forth.

There is a bit more plot to it than that, but honestly not much. But that’s okay, because it’s a short movie (under two hours) possessed of other virtues: It’s gorgeously shot, with stark landscapes and interiors alternately barren and warm; and it captures a mood of childhood freedom and imagination tensely combined with an ever-increasing sense of foreboding.

Apparently, this movie is chock full of symbolism and coded references to the Franco regime, because censorship was still in effect in the ’70s, so social commentary had to be done with this kind of subtle symbolism. And so you can go read about how this or that thing represents some aspect of Spanish society, and if you are writing a thesis about cinema and the Spanish Civil War, you’ll probably want to do that. But otherwise, you can let that flow past you and just accept this movie as a look into the life of a small child in this time and place, and enjoy it for that.

  1. Frankenstein is the creature, you’re the monster. ↩︎