I caught this on late night cable at a hotel in Kamloops, British Columbia last Christmas holiday. Morgan promptly rolled over in bed muttering something about pretentious and arty, and fell asleep, but as tired as I was, I ended up staying up to watch the whole movie, which mesmerized me at every turn.
I missed the beginning of the movie, but was able to later order the DVD, so I'll go from there as well as what I've learned about the movie, including the fact that its cinematographer, Luis Cuadrado, was going blind during the filming of this movie. The movie is also considered a masterpiece in Spanish cinema.
I think what probably appealed to me the most -- outside of the fact Spanish films are interesting to me and many times seem to use magical realism, a device used so often by my favorite author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the fact this also reflected the turmoil of Spain's post civil war -- was the spacing and depth and lighting of the movie, which created a very slow but intense journey.
The story is about a girl named Ana, who lives with her parents and older sister Isabel in a small Spanish village, which seems dry and isolated, maybe part of the meseta, similar to Don Quixote's scenery. At the beginning of the film, the young girls see a traveling cinema featuring Frankenstein, and become intrigued. It's as though there's not much else to do on the dry terrain in the 40s, and the older sister teases the younger one, telling her that she can summon Frankenstein. Lonely, Ana does try. We follow her in the slow and magical endless days as she tries to summon the monster, meanwhile staring vacantly at the sheephold, the sky, the vast dry terrain, the railroad tracks, and the distant forests and river.
The parents show few appearances in the movie, though they are there and interact with the children in longing, rare, hopeful moments -- perhaps children are the only hope. The father works with beehives. The mother writes letters to a long-distance lover. The daughters are given a long leash to investigate their surroundings.
I'm sure there's plenty of political, moral, and other allusions in this tale, but I just enjoyed the visual and expectant journey the film exuded. There was also a sense of dread and horror in the movie and a few incidents that could only be described as dualism in nature of humans (evil/good). A very interesting and moving film, with superb visual direction.