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| Iñaki Aierra and Assumpta Serna in Sweet Hours |
Carlos Saura's Sweet Hours is about a man in the grip of the past. Juan (Iñaki Aierra), a writer, is in the process of turning his memories of childhood and family into a play whose central consciousness is himself as a boy, called Juanico. (Sometimes the Juanico on screen is played by a young actor, Pablo Hernández Smith, but at others Aierra fills the role himself.) Juanico adores his mother, Teresa (Assumpta Serna), and is alienated from his father (Pedro Sempson). During rehearsals, Juan finds himself falling in love with the actress, Berta (also Serna), playing Teresa. And so begins a complex alternation of scenes from Juan's own past, his theatrical re-creation of it, and his affair with Berta. Saura uses the Oedipal relationship of Juan and his mother to color the developing one with the actress playing her. He also explores the political past, as Spain's fascist era under Franco dominates the discourse of Juan's family at the dinner table. Nostalgia lies to us, Saura demonstrates, as the sentimental images in old family albums take on a more sinister significance, especially when we learn that Juanico was intimately connected with his mother's suicide. By the end of the film, when Juan and Berta have become lovers, we see even that rosy-hued affair shadowed by the past. Sweet Hours is skillful in its presentation of the complexity of memory, but almost too delicately ironic.
