Cria cuervos ...

A Spanish movie from 1976, Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos (Raise Ravens) was re-issued by Criterion's Janus Collection 30 years later. Any movie that wins top prizes at the Cannes or Venice film festivals is treated with caution by many film goers, a very different tribe to cineastes. This movie garnered the Cannes Special Jury Prize Award.

At the time, when Franco was on his deathbed, the movie was perceived as a subtle portrait of the Generalissimo's Spain, considered a land of repression and corruption by its critics. Movie critics praised writer-director Saura's calm study of good and evil in the family of eight-year-old Ana, her two sisters, their aunt and grandmother, and their dead parents.

Geraldine Chaplin floats through the film as the suffering mother, the wife of a philandering army officer. She's a figure from the past, recollected possibly only in the young girl's memories or imagination. In the present, she's a ghost who appears in the child's dreams by night and day. The actress is also the to-camera face of Ana as a young woman, recalling aspects of her own and her mother's story.

Even more important for the mystery's shifting perspectives is Ana's stoical face, grabbing the audience's wholehearted attention with the flicker of an eye or barely perceptible muscle movements. Child actress Ana Torrent had already won many awards for her 1973 performance in The Spirit of the Beehive, a Frankenstein-inspired fantasy created by Victor Erice when Torrent was seven years old. It's easy to assume that Saura saw it and Torrent and dreamt up a plot to showcase her exceptional cinematic talent. (Chaplin, the daughter of you-know-who, was Saura's life partner, appearing in ten of his movies.)

Did Ana, as she tells us, poison her father in well-planned revenge for his infidelity and heartlessness to her mother? Who else might she kill in her unlikeable family? The wheelchair-ridden mute grandmother, the domineering aunt who takes charge of the household, the military man's wife who'd had an affair with her father? She loves her older and younger sister, but are they safe? And why does her pet guinea pig die?

The ending is a bitter-sweet resolution, proving that Ana's evil imagination didn't poison anyone, even though she'd planned to. She leaves home to go to school, entering the reality of a modern Madrid previously hidden beyond their exclusive home's garden walls.

I couldn't see the connection between her escape from the past and Spain's release from a fascistic regime. Saura's cinematic skills were evident, and his screenplay artfully wove claustrophobic sets, ancient and modern songs, Hitchcockian red herrings and startling close-up photography. Is it a masterpiece? No, and Criterion rightly placed it in its second-tier Janus classification.