Fairy Tale Friday--Blancanieves (Maribel Verdú, 2012)

Hello and welcome to Fairy Tale Friday. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.

This week we look at a cracking Spanish version made in 2012 that is the most original take on Snow White I have ever seen. It is set in 1920s Seville and centred on a female bullfighter. Did I also mention it is a silent black and white film? As a vegan, I was a bit worried about the bullfighting bit. I will admit, the film made it look more noble than it really is, but some of that is the time this was set in. It is a period piece after all. But it is clear from the filming and confirmed by the helpful “Making Of” extra that many of the scenes of bullfighting were filmed with Blancanieves and the bull acting separately and then the footage of the bull was overlaid on her as we view close ups of her face and the spiders on her eyes I mean long eyelashes and her swishy cape.

 The film was written and directed by Pablo Berger and was truly mesmerising to watch. According to trivia on IMDB, it was shot on colour film stock and desaturated to black & white in post-production.

The acting is superb. Both young Snow White and older Snow White are very good. Especially the younger version played by Sofía Oria. This was her first acting role and she had no prior experience. Her acting is natural and spontaneous. The older version played by Macarena García mostly just had to look wide-eyed/doe-eyed with moist slightly tearful eyes. The star of the film however is the great Maribel Verdú (you may recall her spectacular turn in Pan’s Labyrinth). Her face is so mean and her acting so good at conveying villainous feelings through the medium of silent film as she glares smoulderingly from beneath a black lace veil. The other star of the show is Gallo Pepe the rooster who wears a jaunty little spotted neckerchief and is young Carmencita’s only childhood friend and meets a sticky end from her evil stepmother Encarna. Which is a great name as it includes the word carna which refers to meat.

I could not find a cohesive summary and so I have combined two different summaries which I will insert comments into. The first is a review by ROGER EBERT  and the second is a blog by SPANISH CINEPHILIA    .

The story opens with a famous matador, Antonio Villalta, who is filled with swaggering ego. All goes wrong for him. He is paralyzed in the ring, and his beloved wife dies in childbirth. Their daughter, Carmen, is raised by her grandmother until her death. Antonio unwisely marries the heartless Encarna, his former nurse, who wants only his money and ignores him as he sits in a wheelchair in his room. Note: There is so much to unpack here. Antonio is very pious. He spends ages praying at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary before he goes out to kill a bull. We see his manager/friend roll his eyes at the amount of time he takes to pray. A local paparazzi with his enormous camera with a magnesium flash like the one below tries to get a photo but is rebuffed.

Antonio waves to his very pregnant wife in the crowd and shouts, “This one is for you and our unborn child!” Later, at the end of all the cape swishing when it is time for the bull to die, the relentless paparazzi sneaks over and manages to get a photo just as the bull is about to be slaughtered, but being a magnesium flash it goes BANG which distracts the matador long enough for the bull to gore him and him make him a paraplegic. Then his wife goes into early labour and after a very bloody birth (thankfully…I can’t abide scenes of birth where there is no blood) she dies and he cannot bear to look upon his daughter who is named Carmencita after her mother Carmen who had been a very dramatic flamenco dancer before her untimely demise. You meet Encarna here who is his nurse, and you can see the greed and long range planning on her face as she sees him paralysed and hears that his wife has just died. You see her making up her mind and then butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth as she nurses him back to health. We see her feeding him like a baby bird and him becoming more and more dependant on her. We also meet Carmencita (little Carmen) with her grandmother and her best friend Gallo Pepe the rooster. There is a scene of her being fitted for a communion dress and her effervescence shines through as she cannot help but dance around with joy. All she wants is her absent father to come to her big day at church, but he does not come. She feels unloved, but she does not know he is sat alone in his wheelchair completely neglected.

Her maternal grandmother teaches her to dance flamenco.  When her grandmother passes away, Carmen is sent to live with Encarna. Note: At the party after her first communion, when the child is hiding under a table because she is so sad that her father did not come to her big day, her grandmother entices her out and they do a raucous flamenco dance with lots of hand clapping and then suddenly the grandmother falls dead of a heart attack which is a terrible thing to happen, but especially on the day of your first communion. There follows a great scene where Carmencita’s white communion dress is slowly lowered into a tin washtub and when removed is dyed black for mourning clothes.

  Encarna forbids the child from ascending the stairs to the first floor – where her wheelchair-bound father lives.  Carmen is forced to sleep in a squalid outbuilding, and to work relentlessly on the estate. Note:  We see Encarna cut off Carmen’s black curls giving her a haircut like a boy to try to humiliate the girl. There is a really good montage of her working and you see the struggles of a real life nine year old as she attempts to do the tasks.

 One day, she decides to defy her stepmother and venture upstairs because Gallo Pepe has escaped. The child observes Encarna dominating the household's chauffeur in classic boot-and-whip style.  Note: Yes, we see the fabulous Maribel Verdú doing quite a bit of dominatrix stuff. There is a later scene where she is being painting in her hunting clothes with her dog and she insists that the chauffeur strip down to his underwear and wear the collar and lead of the dog as the painter shrugs his shoulders as if to say, “Rich people. What are they like?” While searching for Gallo Pepe, Carmen finds her father stuck in his wheelchair.

 Carmen and her father develop a close bond: he teaches her the art of bullfighting; and she dances flamenco for him.  Encarna discovers this betrayal and slays Carmen’s pet chicken Pepe. Note: This is a horrific scene where Encarna invites Carmen to dine with her for the first time and says “Would you like some PEPEry chicken?” and then plays it off like she meant the spice not the bird, but then she lifts the domed lid off the platter and you see poor dead Gallo Pepe complete with his neckerchief. This puts little Carmen off chicken for life. We then have a transition which is beautifully filmed where young Carmen is pegging out the wash and pretending the laundry is a  swishy cape and then she becomes older Carmen who looks remarkably like Marcella Detroit from the band Shakespears Sister.

 Fed up with caring for her invalid husband, Encarna hastens his demise by pushing his wheelchair down the stairs. Note: There is a scene after his death where they dress his dead body up in his bullfighting costume and they take comedy photos with his dead body.  She then arranges for her lover the chauffeur to attack the now teenage Carmen in the woods. In a brutal attack he strangles her, tries to rape her then drowns her. Left for dead in a nearby river, Carmen is discovered by a troupe of dwarves, Los Enanitos Toreros. They are bullfighters who travel between cities and look like characters out of a Tod Browning film. As she has no memory of who she is they name her Blancanieves, como la del cuento’ (‘Snow White, like her from the fairy tale’). Note: Here the dwarves are more like rodeo clowns. They have a comedy act where they bullfight a calf. They also have some distinct characteristics—there is the cross dressing one, the eye patch one, the kind handsome one (who becomes a sort of sweetheart to her) and the angry, sullen one with the pencil moustache who resents her plus two more who didn’t seem to have a distinguishing characteristic. They take her on the circuit with them.

When Pencil Moustache dwarf  is wounded, she leaps into the ring and distracts the bull, using the matador skills she learned from her father which makes him resent her even more. Eventually she, too, becomes a famed matador. An unscrupulous agent named Don Carlos gets her to sign a contract that says: "Blancanieves gives exclusive lifetime rights to Don Carlos for all properties, present and future." This will be her undoing. Through them, she rediscovers her knowledge of bullfighting.  She begins performing with them, becoming famous in the process. But she still doesn’t know who she is. As the story unfolds, Encarna becomes aware of the true identity of ‘Blancanieves’, and attempts to poison her with an apple following a victorious performance in the Plaza de Toros in Seville Note: There is a terrific montage of Encarna posing for the 1920’s Spanish equivalent of Hello! Magazine where they take pictures of her in her show-home in a variety of extravagant costumes with outrageous hats. She is told that she will be the cover article with her fancy clothes in her fancy house, but instead Blancanieves makes the cover and is their headlining feature while Encarna and her house are relegated to the back pages and the photo they chose doesn’t even feature her face. In her rage, she clouts her lover over the head with a statuette and then pushes his body in the pool. It is here she vows to kill Carmen at the arena in Seville where she receives top billing. At the arena an old friend of her father speaks to Carmen and says how proud her father would be and as she is on her way out to fight the bull, her memory comes flooding back and she knows who she is. Her stepmother is in the audience and watches her beneath a black lace veil. Pencil Moustache dwarf, who is still mistrustful of her, in a fit of anger switches the signs for the bulls so instead of a calf, the meanest bull is sent out to meet her. With the memory of who she is and her heritage now restored, Carmen swishes her cape and fights the bull and then at the end the audience waves their white hankies—the sign that the bull should be spared, so no blood will be shed that day. The audience are throwing coins and flowers and hats into the arena. Like a snake, Encarna slithers down with the apple and bumps into Pencil Moustache dwarf. She haughtily dismisses him calling him Tom Thumb as she picks up the apple she dropped. She offers up the apple to her stepdaughter, hiding her face behind the veil. We see Carmen take it—there are heart stopping moments where she puts it to her mouth, but then stops to wave to the cheering crowd. Then she bites and falls down dead. Suddenly Pencil Moustache dwarf knows exactly who did this shouts the Spanish version of “J’accuse!!” and they are after her. They chase Encarna into the shed with the meanest bull who gores her to death. Here is where you want a happy ending—the stepmother is dead, surely Carmen will wake up and marry Kind Handsome dwarf? But alas, not so. The unscrupulous Don Carlo owns her body due to the contract she signed, even in sleeping death. Here she becomes like Sleeping Beauty. A side show freak, lovingly tended by Kind Handsome dwarf.

 Slipping into a coma, the girl continues to function as a spectacle.  Patrons pay a small fee to be able to kiss her on the lips, in the hope that she will awake.  The film ends with Kind Handsome dwarf kissing Carmen on the lips: the camera closes in on the corner of her eye, detailing a tear brimming at its edge. Note:  This ending had me in floods. As you see the dwarf who truly loves her have to watch her violated over and over for the price of a coin it breaks your heart. Her hair has grown out quite long to show the passage of time. He is still devoted to her, but how his heart must ache. At the end when the tear comes out—is this an autonomic response or is she aware of everything that happens and cannot move to do anything about it?

This film affected me greatly. The style and cinematography was brilliant and the story fresh and original. You can watch the whole film below, but the title cards will be in Spanish (though you can follow it well enough without them.) But if you don’t have time or the inclination to watch a full length silent film just watch the ending which you can see here:  

The ending. *SOB*

 

The whole film:

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned next week for a horror film version starring Marcia Brady.