The lead in Cría Cuervos is Ana Torrent, the lead from Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive. In Spirit she was seven, here she is ten (in real life). The layers of the narrative are draped over her performance. I've always respected the precocity, energy, and commitment in Natalie Portman's Léon The Professional performance, but she's stagey, histrionic, and vociferous compared to Torrent. I'd call Ana Torrent the little girl James Dean, but she's better than James Dean. She possesses the magic light of a secret, like all truly great actors. The presence of so many of the complexities of childhood depend on the nuances of her performance, and the believability and verisimilitude of these films are partially a product of her strengths.
Physically, Torrent is virtually the same in both movies. She's a girl with tremendous eyes, pretty short. Her emotional range crosses frequently into adult territories (her favorite movie is Frankenstein, she's an attempted murderer), though doesn't stray far from archetypal childhood characteristics (her innocence and compassion, her playfulness - she literally plays).
Unlike other child actors who are written roles in which they 'perform' as children, Torrent is given the chance in Cría Cuervos to behave like a child. When the housekeeper tells the story of the local girl who claimed a virgin pregnancy, Torrent admits she doesn't understand anything being talked about. Only a child could somehow earnestly issue multiple death threats without moral consequence. The narrative works so well because it simply asks Torrent to absorb, to experience, and to encounter, like all children, with a child's limited knowledge of the details and intricacies of adult relationships. She isn't meant to grasp certain social or age related components of the story, and anyway her journey is a deeper one, into the nexus of the soul.
Torrent confronts the death of her mother, followed by her father. She naturally assumes her father died from a poison she herself had stirred into his milk. It was a vendetta for her mother. A question is: will she kill again? Would she just kill everyone whom she doesn't like? Though it isn't a movie about a killer, it's a movie about a little girl, and a single girl, not 'all little girls.' Her psychological make-up is specific to her and her experiences. Some of her actions reflect the behaviors of her parents, there's a clear outline of a person, and she has a multi-dimensional personality.
The film is remarkably well-written. It's told nonlinearly and with dreamlike emphasis; it's written from Torrent's emotional point of view. The exterior portions are vastly interesting themselves. Following her father's death, her aunt and grandmother, from her mother's side, take charge of the house and the upbringing of Torrent and her two sisters. The grandmother is wheel-chair bound and mute, so the aunt shoulders the burden of raising the children. I think the aunt would use the word 'burden,' and the film highlights well her strengths and weaknesses in a motherly role. Another significant character is the housekeeper, who remains employed and has old friendships with the three sisters. Torrent prefers to hang out with the housekeeper, sharing stories and making jokes, or else goofs off with her sisters (they're on vacation from school). There's a kind of warden-prisoner rivalry between the aunt and Torrent; or at least a bitter, difficult period of them getting to know each other.
Also, an adult version of Torrent's character sometimes narrates from a future time beyond the story. There are flashbacks of the parents, and sometimes a surreal blurring of temporal divisions. Like kids on vacation, the narrative isn't superb at keeping track of time. As an audience we record the development of characters, and an emotional progression, more than a sense of real time. We the audience are then as surprised and grounded by the revelation of a school day as the children are. The mention of school reminds us of clocks and schedules and routines.
There are political dimensions to the film as well, but I'm not familiar with all the elements, which might be pretty explicit because the film's Criterion synopsis is "Carlos Saura’s exquisite Cría cuervos . . . heralded a turning point in Spain: shot while General Franco was on his deathbed, the film melds the personal and the political in a portrait of the legacy of fascism and its effects on a middle-class family (the title derives from the Spanish proverb: 'Raise ravens and they’ll peck out your eyes'). Ana Torrent (the dark-eyed beauty from The Spirit of the Beehive) portrays the disturbed eight-year-old Ana, living in Madrid with her two sisters and mourning the death of her mother, whom she conjures as a ghost (an ethereal Geraldine Chaplin). Seamlessly shifting between fantasy and reality, the film subtly evokes both the complex feelings of childhood and the struggles of a nation emerging from the shadows."
It was the emotional specificity of the story that really attracted me. The film is light but deep, fun but serious, wise but innocent.
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