There are several examples in cinema history of ‘what might have been’, films whose impact was diminished by the truncated form in which they reached audiences. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS comes to mind: what if the studio hadn’t taken it away from Orson Welles and re-edited it? Or the full three-hour version of Billy Wilder’s THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES with its two extra stories. In the case of EL SUR, Victor Erice’s first film in the ten years since the much-celebrated THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, the reason only two-thirds of the intended film was made came down to money: the producer pulled the plug halfway into a planned 80-day shoot.
But what survives is unquestionably a masterwork, properly described by Pedro Almodovar as ‘an instant classic…I cry every time I watch it’. What’s more, the missing parts add unexpected depth to the story of 15-year old Estrella (the multi-award-winning writer and director Iciar Bollain) who gradually pieces together the mystery surrounding the past life of her father, Agustin (Omero Antonutti).
In the early 1950s, Estrella wakes one morning to the sound of the dog barking and her increasingly anxious mother Julia (Lola Cardona) calling for Agustin. Estralla’s father hasn’t returned to the isolated house (named ‘The Seagull’) in chilly northern Spain – the family home since the move up from the warmer, more hospitable and increasingly symbolic south: ‘El Sur’. Agustin works as a doctor but also has a strange hinterland which is explored in flashback by both the adolescent Estrella and her eight-year old self (Sonsoles Aranguren). Spending non-hospital hours locked away in his attic room, Agustin introduces the younger Estrella to the world of dowsing for water with a divining rod and pendulum (which he had previously used to predict Estrella’s sex, hovering the pendulum over Julia’s pregnant belly).
EL SUR is literally a film of unfinished business…
Visiting relatives from the south reveal to the older Estrella that one reason behind the move was a rift between Agustin and his father, over the latter’s siding with Franco in the Spanish Civil War. It’s infected Agustin’s family life and his outlook and only reluctantly is he persuaded to attend Estrella’s first communion, preferring instead to spend the morning’s preparations out shooting in the mountains. What is never explained – and presumably would have been had EL SUR been completed – is Agustin’s relationship with the actress Irene Rios, whose films he obsessively watches while spied on surreptitiously by Estrella. In a bleak hotel restaurant, as a raucous wedding party takes place next door, Estrella confronts Agustin with her questions. Receiving no answers, she leaves, never to see him again.
EL SUR is literally a film of unfinished business, yet perfectly realized in its study of the mysteries of family life, both joyful and melancholy. ‘What might have been’ is an epitaph for both the film and Agustin’s intentions. Living in a house called ‘The Seagull’ he is like one of Chekhov’s thwarted characters: for the warm and mythical south, read the unattainable Moscow.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox_Vs1T2AWM