A quietly haunting family album, CRIA! follows an upper-class Spanish family, specifically a young child, during the years following the Spanish Civil War. As the film opens, nine-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) comes downstairs in her nightgown, awakened by the sounds of her father (Hector
Alterio) making love. Behind his closed door, he gasps for breath and dies. Hurriedly leaving his room is Amelia (Mirta Miller), the wife of his best friend. This is the second death for Ana, her mother, Maria (Geraldine Chaplin), having died a few years earlier. Maria, however, has not left Ana's
imagination and continues in this manner to return to her daughter's side, enabling the young girl to resist the attempts of her friendly but stern aunt Paulina (Monica Randall) to raise her and her sisters.
A mesmerizing tale, CRIA! brilliantly weaves the tapestry of time--past and present--into a perfect blend of history. Rather than separate the past from the present, director Carlos Saura layers the two on top of one another. Characters who have died rejoin the living; others, like Ana, exist in
any number of generations. Ana is seen not only as a young girl (the brilliant Torrent) and as an adult (Chaplin), but also in the form of Maria (again Chaplin)--all of whom share the same time and space in the film. A remarkable achievement, which both examines the textures of a once-patriarchal
family life and draws a parallel to the end of the Franco regime. leave a comment
