Ana and the Wolves /
Ana y los lobos (1973) —
"...I saw the hole growing smaller, and little by the little the sky disappear..."
A beautiful, worldly woman trudges through the arid countryside toward a large mansion, carrying with her books and music on cassette tapes and modern clothes. Upon entering the villa to take a position caring for three young children, Ana discovers a cloistered, deeply eccentric family trapped in their own nightmares. An infirm and hysterical matriarch trapped in a more glorious and prosperous past dotes on her three sons: José, the small-statured authoritarian who lovingly collects military paraphernalia and uniforms and is the self-declared
paterfamilias of the house; Juan, the leering, perverted chauvinist who preys on the servants and immediately sets to work writing anonymous pornographic letters to Ana; and Fernando, a quiet, serious man whose outward displays of piety barely conceal his more dangerous compulsions.
At first at least somewhat confused by these men and their peculiarities, Ana begins to casually toy with them as carelessly as she twirls her hair around her finger, sometimes betraying what seems to be real interest in each of their respective obsessions: she spends time with Fernando in the cave where he postures at devoting himself to silent prayer; with José cleaning and posing with his uniforms, medals, masks, and guns; and mockingly teasing the increasingly intrusive Juan while possibly enjoying his inappropriate behavior. But Ana, believing herself to have sufficient control of these forces, fails to grasp how dangerous her situation truly is — once each of these men insist on possessing her and their obsessions begin to disrupt the stability of the household, Ana's refusal to submit results
first in her banishment and then, in a truly shocking and unnerving conclusion, her violation, desecration, and execution.
The brutally effective allegory here is as blunt as a hammer to the temple and fits with Saura's recurrent obsession in the 1960s and 1970s with critiquing Spanish society under fascist rule, but it still seems to be misread by many: the Criterion Channel's summary asserts that the film "lays bare the psychological trauma of life under an authoritarian regime", which I think misses the mark. The brothers certainly represent the pillars of fascism (masculine-insecurity-driven authoritarianism, corrosive chauvinism, self-serving religion) birthed and enabled by a weak, backwards-looking state, but Ana stands in for the best of pre-war Spanish civil society: modern, educated, independent, assertively feminine. Those regressive elements endeavored to control and contain a culture that didn't need them but also indulged them, perhaps believing them so toothless and outdated as to be harmless to engage. When attempts at control failed, ruthless, horrific violence began, and that modern and educated 20th century society was unprepared to defend itself. It seems to me that Saura isn't describing contemporary Spanish society as much as illustrating how that society came to be, and calling out a warning to others that haven't yet indulged their most toxic elements to a fatal extent. Saura's most notable imagery — particularly the child's doll found bound with rope, hair cut off, buried in a shallow grave of mud — pointedly evokes the worst of the war years; that it is Saura's partner — the typically luminous Geraldine Chaplin — who is subjected to horrors
clearly meant to evoke the torture, rape, and murder of the civil war and the subsequent political cleansing of Spain
only heightens the shock of those final moments.
Sacrificing some of the more character-based ambiguities I've enjoyed in Saura's other films to more cleanly drive home the metaphor,
Ana may be less textured and technically ambitious than his prior features, but it retains the wry humor so present in those other works. My favorite example is how the matriarch's wailing concern over Fernando's fasting quickly transitions to concern that her own food might get cold — "and I hate reheated meat!" I also very much enjoyed Ana's exposure to the boxes of childhood mementos illustrating some of the rotten roots of the men of the house: José was forced to dress as a girl "until his first communion, of course"; the orally obsessed Fernando made to keep a pin-cushioned thimble on his thumb to stop him from sucking it; and Juan's indulgence in "disgusting" behavior with Cousin Angelica (perhaps a bit of foreshadowing of Saura's subsequent feature).
