The Bard in Barcelona

Los Tarantos, described in its publicity as "a Spanish West Side Story" spills its Romeo and Juliet legend onto the screen with a moving, ferocious beauty more in the spirit of the memorable Black Orpheus. As drama, it is only an idyl warmed over. As dance and folk poetry, it has a forceful, shimmering integrity of its own.

In modern Barcelona, the feud of two passionate gypsy clans, the Tarantos and the Zorongos, provides a turbulent prologue to the first meeting of young Rafael and Juana at a wedding feast. Dark eyes burn, hands slap out flamenco rhythm, bare feet pound the golden dust: thus Director Rovira-Beleta wordlessly launches a tale of love at first sight with an excitement that Shakespeare himself might envy. Later he tries too many tricky variations on the familiar story line, occasionally becoming somewhat incoherent, but his feel for Spanish gypsy folkways never falters. The tragedy mounts while men, women and children dance a fervid accompaniment in which the worst of enemies seem, at long last, brothers in blood.

Playing Rafael's mother with fiery whiplash energy, Dancer Carmen Amaya proudly declares: "When your father met me, he danced until his feet bled. They were bandaged for 15 days." Ever alert to such cues, Los Tarantos throbs whenever plot and subtitles give way to the stirring beat of darting hands and clicking heels. When an old man caracoles through a whirlwind of autumn leaves. Or when Rafael's doomed friend (Antonio Gades) dances among Barcelona's street sprinklers in the silver-blue wash of a winter's night, casting a rich theatrical spell that makes many another movie musical look as pale as 60-watt moonshine.

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