My Five Year Plan

This is part two in a continuing series of posts about the Carlos Saura retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater. Part three, on Saura’s Peppermint Frappe, will be posted tomorrow evening.

The Hunt (La Caza) was Saura’s first real internationally celebrated work, and as such a cornerstone in his development as a filmmaker. A prizewinner at Berlin, the film, made two years after Lament of a Bandit, was Saura’s first real sign of developing out of preexisting styles toward a new, personal style of filmmaking. Bitter, seething with anger, it is a relentless film that nevertheless catches the audience off-guard in its powerful final sequence.

A group of well-off Civil War vets retire to one of their own’s ranch for a day for leisurely rabbit-hunting along with a younger associate, Quique (Emilio Guiterrez Caba, who plays the role with this sort of Adonis-like naivete, half Joe Dallesandro, half Russ Meyer idiot-stud). Blind to the poverty of the family who tends the hunting range and scandalously self-absorbed, the men hunt on land where they once, as fascist revolutionaries, captured a part of loyalists. This Bunuelian premise - the isolated, remote location, the lack of consummation as a major plot element, iconic animal imagery - is the touchstone for an increasingly upsetting series of set-pieces in which these bitter, backbiting misogynists try (and fail) to vent their leisure-class frustrations by shooting their guns at small animals. If the critique of Franco’s Spain is less nuanced here that it would be in later works, it’s no less potent.

When I speak of the lack of consummation in Bunuel’s work, I am of course refering to plots like The Exterminating Angel, where the guests are unable to leave the party, and Discreet Charm of the Bougeoisie, where they are unable to eat a meal. Here, sans Bunuel’s surrealist narrative touch, the guests are able to shoot, but unable to enjoy, relax, or experience any of the comfort their politically bought economic station would grant them. But there’s more here than Bunuel - Saura’s personal narrative voice becomes clear as the film advances. We see the beginning of strategies that appear in later works - direct address framings which give the hunters’ descriptions of rabbit hunting (loaded with a bounty of subtext and, as tensions rise, text concerning their relationships with women) a markedly politicized context, imbuing these scenes with a delirious, deathly air of fascist sloganeering.

There is also, here, as in Lament for a Bandit (and later, Cria!) a clear pattern of dichotomizing urban and rural space. Saura prefers the latter, favoring the natural, edenic open spaces of Andalusia to modern Madrid (think to those painfully loud car horns throughout all the Madrid exteriors in Cria! and Jose Maria Hinojosa’s romantic infatuation with the Sierra in Lament for a Bandit. Here, the pattern is slightly different - the urbanites are undone by the tranquility of the country, the beauty of the spare landscape and the passive resignation of the abused family of caretakers who watch over their rabbits.