Two Childhoods by Saura

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CRIA! Directed by CARLOS SAURA Screenplay by CARLOS SAURA

COUSIN ANGELICA Directed by CARLOS SAURA Screenplay by RAFAEL AZCONA and CARLOS SAURA

Both of these films are about childhood and both of them are by the man who is, next to Bunuel, the most distinguished Spanish director. But that is where their similarity ends. Cria! is a dark and melodramatic comedy, highly original in plot, about how a child misperceives her actions and their consequences in the adult world. Cousin Angelica, though more stylistically unconventional, is a rather ordinary story about an adult attempting to refine and correct the memories of childhood. Cria! is an almost entirely successful work, while the other, earlier film must be regarded as an honorable failure.

Cria! is about a little girl named Ana (played by the haunting Ana Torrent) who has an innocent penchant for wandering into situations that she cannot fully comprehend. Having witnessed her mother's anguish before her death from cancer, Ana becomes convinced that her philandering father is somehow responsible. She decides to poison him and succeeds--or so she firmly believes. Thereafter, when an aunt who has been appointed guardian to her and her sisters seems to be straying out of line, Ana again resorts to the poison bottle. But Auntie lives. The "poison" turns out to be a harmless household chemical, wrongly identified for the child by her mother (Geraldine Chaplin).

The movie is at its best exploring the confusions that attend the preadolescent years. At that stage, kids have a way of being half-right about how the world works and a sunny, misplaced confidence that they have the whole thing taped. Naturally, they get tripped up a lot, but they get used to it and go bouncing off to school (as Ana does) without moral qualms or regrets. It is this ability to be both right and wrong about even such matters as death that Saura has caught in this deft and strangely touching film.

Cousin Angelica, by contrast, offers a routine story. A middle-aged man returns to visit, after long absence, the family with impressionable whom years he -- which passed his happened most to coincide with the Spanish Civil War. This family were Falangists, whereas his own parents were Republicans. As it happens, their daughter, the Angelica of the title, was his first and only love. His old friends have matured into materialists, while he is an artist-intellectual. Angelica is as unhappy and unfulfilled in her way as he is in his. But they all are most circumspect in their statement of their pain, and nothing of consequence results from this time trip. As the Proustian central figure, Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez proves himself an actor of exquisite tact, with eyes that almost supply the eloquence that is missing from the script. Saura demands much of him, for rather than employ conventional flashbacks, he requires Vazquez to insert his grownup persona into the remembered scenes of childhood. Many of these moments are realized with great poignance, leading one to believe there is at least an element of autobiography in the film. This muted film seems to mean more to its creator than he can communicate to an audience. Clearly the work of a careful and caring artist, Cousin Angelica fails to make manifest the emotions that inspired it and so fails to move the strangers before whom Sau this otherwise well-wrought gift.

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