I’m going to try to catch as many films as I can in Lincoln Center’s Carlos Saura retrospective over the next few weeks. That’s how much Cria! impressed me when I saw it last fall.

So let’s start:

The Hooligans (Los Golfos) was Saura’s debut and an auspicious one at that. Falling straightaway into that great mid-century southern European tradition of urban melodrama in the guise of ‘neorealism,’ it’s the story of Juan (Oscar Cruz), amateur bullfighter, and his friends, a gang of petty criminals who lie, cheat, and rob for spending money. Seeing Juan’s bullfighting talent as an out from their humdrum lives, they try to raise capital to invest in his turning professional the only way they know how. It’s a beautiful film, with gorgeous black and white cinematography and an intensely lyrical sense of time: Saura intercuts regular-speed shots of Juan’s friends watching him fight bulls (often in iconic extreme close-ups or two-shots) with beautiful slow-motion images of Juan’s practice. Often he, as he does later in Cria!, stops the action entirely to scan the Madrid skyline, punctuated by flamenco guitar. He also demonstrates a bravura directorial control with intense camera moves, including one rapid sideways tracking shot that was as pioneering in 1959 as anything in Truffaut’s contemporaneous 400 Blows.

But none of this would be important, of course, if on a narrative level the film were a failure, which I am glad to say it is not. Juan’s narrative is compelling, not the least because it explores masculine performativity among Madrid’s troubled youths. Where Juan has his sport as a means of releasing the burst-bubble frustration of living in Franco’s economically and socially stagnant regime, his friends are left to more dangerous avenues of releasing their anger. This dichotomy, which later became a staple of urban American youth dramas, is nuanced through Saura’s subtle exploration of his characters’ complex inner lives, and the film’s emotionally compelling final act is a masterclass in neorealist dramaturgy.

Lament for a Bandit (Llanto por un Bandido) on the other hand registers as an off-color failure. After the difficulty Saura found in getting distribution for his politically - ahem - insensitive Los Golfos, he cranked out this oddball epic, a sort of reverie of national myth and violence in Andalusia that relates the political awakening of a bandido. (Caught between a king he hates and a liberal reform movement he recognizes as failing, Jose Maria (Francisco Rabal) tries to balance his increasingly powerful posse of bandits between these warring factions.) There’s a certain tension here between what seems like Saura’s desire to explore the larger political implications of making a film about royalists and revolutionaries in Franco’s Spain and a seemingly instructed tendency toward a whole bunch of ceremonial hootenanny. There’s a lot of bad stuff here, enough overly pictorial diddling, middlebrow speechifying and lazy, half-hearted plotting to fill at least two George Stevens movies, and the MIA main character, never given much in the way of compelling action or personal affect to make for a recognizably distinct presence until late in the film, is a bit of a nonstarter, though to be honest, perhaps I’m just not Spanish enough to appreciate the guy. According to the Lincoln Center calendar, Rabal’s character is a recognizable historical figure in the Spanish conscious and thus carries with him a lot of emotional and narrative baggage.

And yeah, you’re reading that poster right. Lino Ventura drops by for an extended cameo here as El Lutos, highwayman, drifter and all around Mean Bastard. Watching Ventura powerslam the dead body of a woman from the second story balcony of an inn (followed by a masterful dolly into the woman’s body) is by far the film’s most singular moment.

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « “Dear Sister” and Avant-Garde Video
• » Saura Retro - The Hunt

• BROWSE / IN Miscellaneous
• « “Dear Sister” and Avant-Garde Video
• » Saura Retro - The Hunt