Unless
there are impenetrable barriers, most young
children love their parents unconditionally,
perceiving them as all knowing and all loving.
Of course, with growing up often comes a
realization that the parents you put on a
pedestal are just human beings with flaws, some
small, some big. This realization comes
reluctantly to Estrella in Victor Erice's
poignant 1983 film, El Sur (The South), the
beautiful story of the relationship of a
daughter and her father, one of only three
feature films Erice made in forty years, each
one a masterpiece.
Based on the novel of the same name by Adelaida
Garcia Morales, the story takes place in the
context of post-civil war Spain. Narrated
powerfully by fifteen-year-old Estrella, the
film is composed of memories and fantasies as
she seeks to make sense of the painful events of
her childhood. Shot by cinematographer
José Luis Alcaine using only natural
light, the opening conveys a feeling of an
enchanted world. In the first frame, Estrella
(Iciar Bollain) awakens in a darkened room with
the light focusing only on her. The camera zooms
to her hands as she discovers a small box under
her pillow containing the pendant her father
used as a divining rod.
In her memory, it is the symbol of her father's
power that he once used to guess her sex by
holding the pendant over her mother's stomach.
In the background, we hear a dog barking and
Estrella's mother (Lola Cardona) calling for her
husband Agustín (Omero Antonutti), but he
is nowhere to be found and Estrella knows that
he is not coming back. It is only then that the
camera moves to her face where a tear is
visible. El Sur then flashes back seven years
when eight-year-old Estrella, sensitively
portrayed by Sonsoles Aranguren, and her parents
have moved from the south of Spain and are
traveling by train to the north where Agustin
has found a job as a doctor in a local hospital.
Estrella's insights into events taking place
around her are mature beyond her age. "I grew up
more or less like everyone else,” she says,
getting used to being alone and not thinking too
much about happiness." When she is older, her
father, whom she idolizes, instructs her in the
art of divination and she looks at it as a
transfer of a supernatural gift. The
slow-developing story reveals the shift in
Estrella's perception both of her father and of
her country. As she begins to learn more about
the war that divided her family and her country,
her view of the south as the mythical place
depicted in postcards and movies, begins to
unravel.
To Estrella, her father's life in the south has
always been a mystery and she questions Milagros
(Rafaela Aparicio), her father's former
governess who is visiting their house, about his
life. The governess tells her of the rift her
father had with his own father who favored
Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and how unhappy
his life had been when he was growing up.
Estrella's discovery of Agustin's devotion to
the starlet Irene Rios (Aurore Clément)
whose films played at the local theater is even
more unsettling, however, as is the matter of
his continuing relationship with a mysterious
woman in the south.
The nature of the circumstances that are
revealed in the film, however, do not prepare us
sufficiently for the events that follow. Forced
to curtail production before completion, Erice
would have traced Estrella's journey back to the
south to uncover the reality of her father's
despair, but lack of funding did not permit this
and the film, which Erice claims would have
become much lighter in tone, was never finished.
Although, because of the film's incompleteness,
character motivations are murky, El Sur is still
a brilliant and haunting work of art. A timeless
film of symbol and myth, it was voted the sixth
best Spanish film in the 1996 Spanish cinema
centenary.
