A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, October 5, 2020

The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)

Junio Valverde and Fernando Tielve in The Devil's Backbone

Cast: Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve, Íñigo Garcés, Irene Visedo, José Manuel Lorenzo, Francisco Maestre, Junio Valverde, Berta Ojea, Adrián Lamana, Daniel Esparza, Javier Bódalo. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, David Muñoz. Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro. Production design: César Macarrón. Film editing: Luis de la Madrid. Music: Javier Navarrete. 

It's October, which means that all the purveyors of classic movies like TCM and the Criterion Channel are rolling out their horror films and ghost stories. Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone falls more into the latter category than the former, for although it has moments of high tension and bloodshed, its focus is largely on the haunting of an isolated Spanish orphanage by a young boy who wants to get revenge on his murderer. It's set at the end of the Spanish Civil War, which gives the film an underpinning of historical reality, and it adds some realism in the portrayal of the relationships that develop among the boys who have been sent there after the deaths of their parents in the conflict. It's as much high melodrama as horror movie, with a handsome villain, Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who murdered the boy Santi (Junio Valverde) to conceal his attempts to break into the safe where the operators of the orphanage, Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi), are hiding gold that is meant to support the loyalist cause. Murder will out, largely with the help of young Carlos (Fernando Tielve), the latest arrival to the orphanage, who learns to communicate with the ghost of Santi. On this simple framework, del Toro layers a good deal of Gothic oddities, including some fetuses preserved in rum, an unexploded bomb in the orphanage courtyard, a murky cistern, and Carmen's artificial leg. Atmosphere is everything in a movie of this genre, and del Toro is a master at creating it, using the contrast of the sunny Spanish landscape and the shadowy interior of the orphanage to great effect. The film is not so unrelenting a creepshow as some of del Toro's other films, like Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017), which are more highly regarded but which I actually like less than The Devil's Backbone.

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