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The approach—elegance with dark roots—is at once stated, a glamour puss lavishly tends to her eyelashes in close-up while malevolent oinks are heard offscreen. The large porker is brought in to cap a tacky bit of familial mélo, and the whole thing is dropped into the lap of the audience, and of the tycoon (José Luis López Vázquez), puzzled and catatonic in his wheelchair. Partly paralyzed and fully amnesiac since a car accident, he vegetates as his clan, Chabrolian in its venality, stages reenactments in hopes of jogging his memory, especially in relation to his Swiss bank account. His father (Francisco Pierrá) taps a pile of pesetas and a geography book, his wife (Luchy Soto) complains about the kids and guides his hand toward the safe on the wall, all to no avail. "Let the subconscious work!" Carlos Saura uses the sardonic premise for illusions within illusions, in-jokes even ("La caza!" the patient exclaims amid friends and shotguns), but first and foremost for the decay of a culture long deformed under fascism. The adult infant won't drink his vitamin shake until he gets a glimpse of the maid's bosom, in the sickroom a visit from the gorgeous aunt quickly escalates into a sticky kiss. (The root of the stunting is posited in a dilapidated warehouse dressed up as a cathedral, where the protagonist watches impotently as his First Communion becomes the Second Republic.) A remembrance of Dreiser, the medieval vision that pushes the millionaire into a maze of doorways: Saura's cinema of elusive dislocation as shock therapy. A recorded company speech momentarily breaks the spell, nevertheless the stalled ride lingers at the close. "What matters here are the symbols." With Charo Soriano, Lina Canalejas, Alberto Alonso, Julia Peña, and Esperanza Roy.
--- Fernando F. Croce |