Sweet Hours (Carlos Saura, 1982)

Iñaki Aierra and Assumpta Serna in Sweet Hours

Cast: Iñaki Aierra, Assumpta Serna, Álvaro de Luna, Jacques Lalande, Alicia Hermida, Luisa Rodrigo, Alicia Sánchez, Pedro Sempson, Isabel Mestres, Pablo Hernández Smith, Magdalena García. Screenplay: Carlos Saura. Cinematography: Teo Escamilla. Art direction: Emilio Sanz de Soto. Film editing: Pablo G. del Amo. 

 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. 

Peppermint Frappé (Carlos Saura, 1967)

Peppermint Frappé sounds like it should be a teen beach party movie, at least until you see that it's directed by Carlos Saura and dedicated to Luis Buñuel. Then you know it's going to be a somewhat kinky story with darkly comic overtones. It opens with a middle-aged man cutting pictures of fashion models out of magazines. He's Julián (José Luis López Vázquez), a physician who runs a radiology clinic with the help of his nurse, Ana (Geraldine Chaplin), who is as quiet and conservative as he is. Then he's reunited with a boyhood friend, Pablo (Alfredo Mayo), whose life is virtually the antithesis of Julián's: Pablo has been living an adventurous life in Africa, he drives a Corvette, and he has just married the smashingly pretty and vivacious Elena, who is also played by Chaplin in a tour de force performance. Eventually, Julián's jealousy of Pablo and desire for Elena will take an increasingly predictable course, as his obsession leads to an attempt to remake Ana into Elena. Not that Saura's film is ever really predictable: As a director he has too many tricks up his sleeve, so that things always stay a little off-balance, especially when Julián invites Pablo and Elena to his weekend retreat in the country, which is next to an abandoned spa where Pablo and Julián used to play as children. Saura's use of setting is masterly in this sequence. The title refers to Pablo's favorite cocktail, a crème de menthe-based concoction served over crushed ice; it's a particularly venomous shade of green not found in nature. And yes, it plays a part in the denouement. López Vázquez and especially Chaplin give terrific performances, but the movie doesn't add up to much more than a showcase for them and Saura's skewed way of telling a story.