Alright, let's try this again...
Mr Sausage wrote:I've heard this is an allegory for Spain under Franco. I kind of saw where political elements could be explored, but I didn't actually see it form into an allegory. Could anyone explain how the movie functions as an allegory?
IMDB lists the film as being released in Spain in January 1976, while Franco died in November 1975 after a couples years of
visible decline in power and health. I think it is fair to say that this was concieved and produced while Franco was on his deathbed. The fact that Saura begins the film with the death of the Francoist character implies that he is making this film with an eye to the future rather than the past.
As stated above, the father in the film is obviously a stand-in for the Francoist regime. Saura's family had sided with the communists during the Spanish civil war, and Saura was critical of the regime in his films- the booklet states that this is the first film that he was able to release completely under his control, since his rising international profile made the regime wary of attempting to censor his work. Throughout the film, the father appears to give the impression of a dignified figure, living in a rather impressive house and always seen in his clean pressed military uniform. This hides his true character, however, as a man who is never seen showing any interest in his children and who would both cheat on his wife and cuckhold his best friend at the same time. I think the inherent slam against the regime is fairly obvious.
On the other hand, the mother figure, who shares a passion for piano with Saura's own mother, would be a stand in for the communists. Both were removed from the picture long ago, and both left a void that allowed the "bad" authority figure to seize control. I use the word bad instead of evil because we never get a sense that the father is ill-intentioned in what he does; he is just ineffectual as a parent and succumbs quite easily to his vices. I think that if we see the two parents as the warring sides of the civil war, then each daughter can be seen as a different generation in Spain, with the eldest, Irene, being old enough to have been raised by both parents, Ana being raised as the mother was dying, and Maite being too young to remember the mother. I don't think Saura intended the daughters to be read this way, though, since Ana's two sisters are never given enough characterization to distinguish them from Ana.
The interesting character in this reading is the Aunt, who I take to be a more moderate power that would presumably fill the vacuum that Franco left behind. As I said earlier, I agree with Lemmy Caution that she is a sympathetic character who tries her best, but after her troubled upbringing Ana has a very difficult time trusting her.
And what a troubled upbringing Ana has! I was kind of surprised to see people say they could relate to the film; although my childhood obviously wasn't perfect, I never saw it as dark and bleak as this film depicted it. As adult Ana states in the movie, she never saw childhood as an inherently happy time, and this film matches that description perfectly. For one thing, death is constantly hanging over this movie, quite literally from the opening scene of the father dying to the closing scene where Irene relates a dream where she is kidnapped and killed while her parents are away. With everything in between, from the girls playing a game of hide and seek where people who are found "die", to poor Roni's sudden passing, to Ana wishing both herself and her Aunt dead, death is never far from the narrative.
The effect of this is that Ana is almost unnaturally accustomed to death at a very young age. She asks her grandmother if she would like help in commiting suicide just as easily as she asks if she would like to go out in the garden, and she poisons her aunt without any remorse whatsoever. For me, the most chilling part of this movie was the scene where she goes to check on her aunt, and rather than feel the sudden guilt that I would feel when I was younger and realized I had made a mistake (never anything like this, fortunately!) she coldly takes the glass and washes it, presumably to hide the evidence. The impression I get is that being surrounded by death has made death very ordinary for her.
Another example of this is the scene where Ana's mother confronts her father over his infidelities. We see this scene through Ana's memory, where first she is watching from the top of the staircase but by the end of the scene has moved to within feet of the arguing parents, so that we see the back of her head in the frame as if she were sitting a few rows ahead of us in the audience of the theater. It is a very dramatic scene, with the mother breaking into tears and the father erroneously dismissing the idea that she is dying. At another point in the movie, we see the two girls reenacting this scene as they "play house". The complexity of the exchange and the accuracy of their word choice seems like something that they could not have made up on their own, so presumably they are reenacting a scene that they had witnessed between their own parents enough times that it became burned into their memories. Except this time, there is no drama- they are laughing through a scene that had driven their mother to tears. I get the impression that they have seen this event enough that it has become normal to them, similar to how death has become normal to Ana. I think this is the crux of Saura's message in the film- people aren't intentionally raising the ravens of the title, but when the younger generation is raised in war and conflict, you run the risk of war and conflict becoming the norm for them. I felt that Ana was a very broken child in this film, and despite the Aunt's best efforts to "fix" the damage caused by her upbringing, I think it is going to stick with her for a long time. We never see any resolution to Ana's desire to kill her aunt; I don't see any reason why she won't try again.
One other aspect that I thought was interesting enough to touch on was Ana's relationship with her grandmother. Both of them are living in the past, with the grandmother spending the days reminiscing on old photographs, and Ana reminiscing on her mother and pulling her into the present.
Finally, what's with the chicken feet in the fridge? My best guess is that they are a popular snack, perhaps given to the children by their mother and thus provide the same blend of morbidity and nostalgia that is present throughout the movie, but this is just (rather weak) speculation on my part.
