Spanish Cinema of the New Millennium: And the Winners Are...

First published in the UK in 2019 by

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First published in the USA in 2019 by

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Cover images: (top) Alberto Rodríguez’s La isla minima. © 2014, Antena

3 Films, S.L.U., Sacromonte Films, S.L., Atípica Films, S.L. and

(bottom) Emilio Martínez-Lázaro’s Ocho apellidos vascos. © 2013,

Lazona Films, S.L., KowalskiFilms, S.L., Snow Films, A.I.E.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Best Spanish Films of the New Millennium

Chapter 1: 2000–04

Chapter 2: 2005–09

Chapter 3: 2010–15

Chapter 4: The Winners and Beyond

Appendices

Filmography: Goya and Box-Office Winners, 2000–15

References

About the Author

Index

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to McDaniel College for funding my sabbatical research that gave me the opportunity to work on this book. Class discussions with my students in my course on el cine español del nuevo milenio helped shape my analysis. I appreciate the software help from my colleague Mohamed Esa and from Anita Thiernan in Academic Support. I would also like to express my appreciation to my wife, Isabel Valiela, for her support throughout this project.

Some of the ideas expressed in this book were published in the following publications and appear here with permission (the translations to English are my own):

"The Spanish Golden Age Revisited: Agustín Díaz Yañez’s Alatriste (2006) and Antonio del Real’s La conjura del Escorial (2008)." The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies, vol. 8, Fall 2010, pp. 113–28.

"Pa negre (Pan negro): Bildungsroman/bildungsfilm de memoria histórica." La nueva literatura hispánica, vol. 16, 2012, pp. 397–416.

"Un viaje por el tardofranquismo: Vivir es fácil con los ojos cerrados." Crítica Hispánica, vol. 38, no. 1, 2016, pp. 157–72.

"Blancanieves: A Film Adaptation of ‘Snow White’ with a Spanish Twist." Marvels & Tales, vol. 30, no. 2, 2017, pp. 328–53.

Special appreciation goes to the following, who provided permission for stills and/or the images that illustrate this book:

El Bola, courtesy of EGEDA

La comunidad, courtesy of EGEDA

Mar adentro, courtesy of EGEDA

La gran aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón, courtesy of EGEDA

Torrente 3, courtesy of EGEDA

Te doy mis ojos, courtesy of EGEDA

Blancanieves, courtesy of Arcadia Motion Pictures

Camino, courtesy of Mediaproducción S.L.U. y Películas Pendelton S.A.

Celda 211, courtesy of Vaca Films

La isla mínima, courtesy of Atípica Films, SacromonteFilms, Atresmedia Cine

La soledad, courtesy of Jaime Rosales

Los lunes al sol, courtesy of Mediaproducción S.L.U.

No habrá paz para los malvados, courtesy of LaZona Films

Ocho apellidos catalanes, courtesy of LaZona Films

Ocho apellidos vascos, courtesy of LaZona Films

Pa negre, courtesy of Massa D’Or Produccions

Truman, courtesy of Imposible Films

Volver, courtesy of El Deseo D.A., S.L.U.

Introduction

The Best Spanish Films of the New Millennium

And the winner is…: Each year, national film academies around the world celebrate their country’s best films, and both those in the film industry and audiences at home eagerly await the results.¹ In Spain, the Academy (Academia de las Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas de España) has celebrated its Goya Awards since 1987. And yet, the winner for each year could also be seen from another perspective: the film that is the biggest box-office success of the year. This study analyzes the films that Spanish society deems the most important in the new millennium—the winners in these two categories from 2000 to 2015—in order to examine questions of national identity in relation to the Spanish cinematic industry. The list of winners in each category is in Appendix 1.²

National identity is a complicated question, and with regard to Spain, perhaps even more so. Benedict Anderson portrays a nation as an imagined political community of people who perceive themselves as part of the group in question (6) (Juan F. Egea notes that Anderson’s book deals with the creation of nations and does not mention film, so film must help in the refashioning (or reimagining) of a community [12].) Then what about Spain? It is a country with four co-official languages—Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and Galician—and different regional cultures; the notion of nation or country is often blurred, as in the Basque Country, or the Catalan Countries. During the Franco regime, the languages and cultures of the traditional historical regions of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia were suppressed. The transition from Franco’s dictatorship to democracy allowed for a new flourishing of these languages and cultures, but today some Catalans would like to secede from Spain, an issue that has both cultural and legal ramifications. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas believe, it is increasingly difficult to talk confidently any more of a singular Spanish identity as such, as Spain becomes both globalized and internally fragmented through processes of political devolution (Contemporary 5). Although the Spanish language dominates the film industry, movies are made in each of Spain’s languages, and in 2010, for the first time, a movie in a language other than Spanish, the Catalan Pa negre (Black Bread, 2010), won the Goya for Best Film. This film and others in the regional languages are examples of micro-regionalism (Kinder, Blood Cinema 388 ff.) and how Nationally specific cinema […] is not bound to the homogenizing myths of nationalism and national identity (Crofts 388).

Spanish society has wrestled with the question of identity for decades. During the Franco regime, in order to attract foreign visitors, the Ministry of Tourism invented the slogan, Spain is Different. The regime wanted to create a vision of Spain as an exotic destination based on controversial markers of Spanish identity: bullfighting, flamenco, and Carmen. With Franco’s death and the transition to democracy, Spaniards tried to overcome this legacy, and one of the elements of this effort was creating a new vision of Spain in which it is fully European. This phenomenon was captured in the cover story of the influential weekly, Cambio 16, on October 26, 1987, which showed a map of Europe with Spain missing, and the headline, Where Is Spain? For film, as both a manifestation of culture and as an industry, this vision has an impact on its cinematic productions, as Spanish film is increasingly transnational.

Another question would be what is Spanish? or what is Spanishness? Cristina Sánchez-Conejero states that Spanishness emerges as an openly plural concept in post-Franco Spain—ethnically, religiously, and even linguistically (4). But the term Spanishness itself is complicated. Valeria Camporesi states that in Spanish cinema, there are two terms regarding Spanishness—españolada, which is a synonym of folklore, picturesqueness, local color, a peculiar interpretation (well or poorly done) of national culture and customs, and on the other hand, españolidad, as synonymous of national culture, Spanish cultural identity (30).

According to Núria Triana-Toribio, Spanishness is a term which refers to the essential features of Spanish identity, and as such, it is a fiction, a fantasy but it is a term that cannot be avoided and appears in "two different forms as españolada (generally negative) and españolidad (usually complimentary)" (Spanish National Cinema 6–7), with the former being comedies and musicals set in Andalusia (62) that therefore play on stereotypes of what is Spanish. Nevertheless, humorous takes on these stereotypes resulted in Spain’s biggest box-office hit ever, Ocho apellidos vascos (Spanish Affair, 2014).

One of the categories that Stephen Crofts uses in his analysis of nation-state cinemas is national-cultural specificity (39), and writing about Danish cinema, Mette Hjort states that recognizable national locations, language, and national actors that mirror the material culture of Danes, qualify as being about Denmark, but he believes that the thematization of nation requires flagging or foregrounding of these elements, which can occur through choice of shots, dialog, acting styles, etc. (108, 111). The same can be applied to Spanish cinema, and our close textual readings of the films include these elements throughout, but there are instances where they are absent. Regarding Spanish national identity or Spanishness in cinema, Robert Sklar states:

It takes several forms. One involves the ways that a film may communicate or register the distinctive qualities of a place or a culture; what intonations, gestures, sights, manners, social relations mark a way of living that speaks specifically of Spain

but perhaps this Spanishness is too subtle or complicated or fraught to be addressed in the contemporary transnational cinema context; maybe the marketplace is not interested in what makes Spain, Spain (xvi).

Focusing on Catalan cinema, Joan M. Minguet Batllori delineates the following criteria for a national cinema: the language of the country; having screen adaptations of the country’s literary works; the presence of historical and sociological motifs of the country; the presence of emblematic characters of the culture of a country; through the anthropological or geographic resources; through an autochthonous filmic conception (1137–41). These criteria are also problematic. For example, Spain’s most emblematic literary characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, have been brought to the screen in Russia (Grigori Kozintsev) and England (Terry Gilliam). Likewise, Spanish directors sometimes adapt non-Spanish literary works to the screen, such as Pedro Almodóvar’s Carne trémula (Live Flesh, 1997), based on the Ruth Rendell novel; his Julieta (2016), based on Runaway (2004) by Alice Munro; or Isabel Coixet’s Elegy (2008), based on Philip Roth’s novel The Dying Animal (2001), which she filmed in Vancouver. And some original scripts in contemporary Spanish cinema show nothing of cultural specificity, manifesting Paul Willerman’s observation: The specificity of a cultural formation may be marked by the presence but also by the absence of preoccupations with national identity (210). And María Camí-Vela, writing on the films of Isabel Coixet, notes that defining the identity of a cinema with respect to the national reality (that is, the socio-cultural context) to which it presumably pertains, is doubly problematic, when the very concept of nation should be reformed (180).

Barry Jordan and Mark Allinson believe that as seen from outside Spain, Spanish films are sold in foreign markets largely on the basis of their auteurist credentials, usually reflecting the marketing strength of the director’s name and on the promise of visual flamboyance, edgy, subversive narratives and scenes of often explicit sexual activity (73). The two Spanish directors who are best known outside of Spain are Pedro Almodóvar and Alejandro Amenábar. Almodóvar is the Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999) and for Best Original Screenplay, Hable con ella (Talk to Her, 2002); and Alejandro Amenábar is the Oscar winner for the Best Foreign Film, Mar adentro (The Sea Inside, 2005). Nevertheless, the three top Spanish films in terms of worldwide earnings are in English and have essentially nothing to do with Spain: The Others (2001), The Impossible (2012), and Planet 51 (2009) (The 20 worldwide). And Spanish cinema relies increasingly on the market abroad to keep it afloat: In 2012, Spanish cinema earned 150.5 million euros abroad in comparison with 110 million in movie theaters at home (Ruiz de Elvira). To what extent do Spanish filmmakers have foreign audiences in mind? How does this affect Spanish film production?

Spanish national identity with regard to the film industry is an even more complicated question, because from the very beginning, Spanish film has had transnational components. Among the earliest Spanish film directors is Segundo de Chomón, who worked in France and in Italy, with classic titles such as El hotel eléctrico (The Electric Hotel) and La maison ensorcelée (The Haunted House) both from 1908; and the first talkie in Spanish, Ojos verdes (Green Eyes) starring Concha Piquer, was filmed by Lee de Forest and shown at New York’s Rivoli in 1923 (EFE). During the past decade, the Spanish film industry has produced an average of 185 films per year (50 of which are co-productions), but this is nothing new, as Casimiro Torreiro notes that between 1964 and 1968, 50–60 per cent of all Spanish films were co-productions (Buse, Triana-Toribio, and Willis 339). Transnational productions, in particular, make the question of a film’s nationality a genuine puzzle (Berthier and Seguin xvi). If the director is not Spanish, is it a Spanish film? If it is not filmed in Spanish, is it a Spanish film? If it does not even have Spanish actors, is it a Spanish film? Several films listed by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport cause us to scratch our heads. Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona (2008) has two out of three protagonists portrayed by Spanish actors (Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz) and was filmed in Barcelona, but filmed in English, and the director is Woody Allen; it counts. The Others, starring Nicole Kidman, and Agora (2009), starring Rachel Weisz, were both shot in English (the former was shot mainly in Spain; the latter in Malta), and were directed by Alejandro Amenábar; both count. Planet 51 is an animated film directed by Jorge Blanco but has a script by Joe Stillman, who wrote Shrek (2001), and was dubbed first into English; it counts. The Secret Life of Words (2005), starring Tim Robbins, Sarah Polley, and Javier Cámara, was filmed in English in Ireland; it counts. And perhaps the most extreme case: Fast and Furious 6 (2013), was directed by Justin Lin and starred American actors, but had Spanish production money and one Spanish filming location (the Canary Islands); it counts. So what is a Spanish film?

In her Spanish National Cinema, Núria Triana-Toribio maintains, Since nations are intimately tied up with narrative acts, it seems inevitable that cinema, the most powerful narrative machine of the twentieth century, has had something to say in the formation of national identities (6). Juan F. Egea offers a similar opinion regarding the potential of cinema as a social and discursive practice that ‘constructs national subjects’ (11). According to Susan Hayward,

a country’s narratives […] serve a reflexive role in that a culture uses them in order to understand its own signification and meaning. Narratives are a nation’s way of making sense to itself. Nations may and do have narratives in common but the specificity of their articulation is determined by the particular culture. […] It is in its specificity, therefore, that a filmic narrative can be perceived as a reflection of the nation.

(Questions 99)

My analysis shows the specificity of each film.

For films that do not manifest national cultural specificity, we limit our comments to their importance to the Spanish film industry and to Spanish culture as a whole. Thus, the case of Spain confirms Finney’s comment, The international film industry is a volatile meeting place of art and commerce (1), or as Anne Jäckel notes, in European cinema, countries are concerned not only with the creation of new jobs at home but also with the social and cultural value of film (146).

Peter Buse, Núria Triana-Toribio, and Andy Willis, in their The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia, state:

Scholarship on Spanish cinema, for the most part, still subscribes to an unquestioned dichotomy which privileges art-house cinema and neglects its supposed opposite, popular cinema. As a result, this scholarship, whether it concentrates on the broader development of Spanish cinema or on individual film-makers, tends to rely heavily on the high art concept of auteurism at the expense of an understanding of cinema as a mass form.

(4)

Susan Hayward avers: Clearly popular cinema which is the majority of cinema produced (as opposed to art cinema) has to be central to any investigation as does audience consumption (Questions 96), and according to Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich, the question of the relationship between national identity and popular culture is crucial (6).

Popular, however, is another complicated term. Raymond Williams’s notion that popular has the predominant modern meaning of ‘widely favoured’ or ‘well-liked’ includes the caveat that it contains a strong element of setting out to gain favour (180). With regard to movies, all cinematic productions have this end (among others), since no director or producer makes a film to lose money, and many factors go into this goal: choice of narrative, actors, marketing campaign, etc. Taking up Williams’s definition, John Storey avers,

The difficulty with the coming together of culture and popular in this way is that unless we can agree on a figure over which something becomes popular culture, and below which it is just culture, we might find that widely favored or well liked by many people would include so much as to be virtually useless as a conceptual definition of popular culture. On the other hand, if we want a non-evaluative, pure descriptive definition, this may be the only useful one.

(263–64, emphasis added)

Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich observe that this meaning of popular corresponds to what Stuart Hall has called ‘the market or commercial definition of the term’ [Hall 231]. It refers to whether or not something is consumed or accepted by large numbers of people" (2). In their Spanish Popular Cinema, Antonio Lázaro Reboll and Andrew Willis also follow Williams, noting that popular culture

refers to something that is enjoyed or consumed by large numbers of people but not produced by them. This links cinema to the market and identifies films as commodities. However, any understanding of these popular forms must accept that mediums such as cinema do not operate simply within society; rather, they form a complex set of relations between production, distribution and exhibition, and consumption.

(5)

In cinema, then, Williams’s widely favored, refers to consumption, i.e., audiences, and I base my research on an economic or statistical audience, recorded in terms of admissions or box-office receipts, which has become the dominant concept of ‘audience’ for the film industry (Christie 11). By establishing box-office success as a figure, I hope to distinguish those winners (and in the conclusion, the runners-up) as a category on which to reflect cultural meaning. I base the list of popular films on consumption data published annually by Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport. (Movie theaters in Spain, like those of many countries, are dominated by American films, and an examination of the biggest box-office hits for each year of the new millennium indicates that only two or three Spanish films make the top twenty list in Spain.) So what do these two lists—those chosen by the Academy and the list of most popular Spanish films—the biggest box-office hits for each year—say about Spanish culture and Spanish identity? And what is missing from these two lists? By analyzing films from the box-office winner category, I hope to fill in the gap between the two categories, while recognizing that they are not mutually exclusive.

I also recognize that there is sometimes tension between the two categories. Charles Acland states, there is a tendency to deploy commercial screen presence of features as a way to measure not only the national cinema but the ‘quality’ of the popular audience. Such calls for the ‘improvement’ of popular taste have been documented in other countries in addition to his home country of Canada (169). The Spanish case in point is the Torrente series, often bashed for its bad taste, but popular (well liked) it is, with each film in the series a box-office hit. Gregorio Belinchón notes, "Torrente 4 is the triumph of popular cinema, understood as a class of films that the rest of the industry often observes with something between envy and disdain (Es cine popular").

In addition to the questions of the national and the popular, I hope to address some key issues regarding the transnational element of Spanish cinema, as noted by Marvin D’Lugo and Gerard Dapena; this would

take into account the flow of foreign and national capital across Spain’s borders, the appropriation and adaptation by Spanish filmmakers of cinematic styles, film scores, and genres associated with other national cinemas, and the identity of the intended audiences (national and/or international) for which these films were originally conceived.

(39)

The two lists of winners reflect the variety that exists in Spanish film, both regarding genres and subject matter. They also often reflect a difference between what is considered quality cinema (as defined by the Academia) and popular cinema. For Thomas Elsaesser, European cinema has three basic categories: art and auteur cinema, commercial productions facing Hollywood, and avant-garde cinema whose filmmakers […] have almost always refused the label national cinema, because they see themselves as both international and anti-cinema (42). And Núria Triana-Toribio believes, Spain’s hegemonic film culture represents in general a combination of the first two camps, while sometimes includes elements from the third (Spanish Film Cultures 6), and she states that between 1986 and 2011, hegemonic film culture identified quality in practices, products and professionals bolstering the European art cinema model (10), defined by Ginette Vincendeau as aesthetically innovative, socially committed and humanist in outlook (56). Triana-Toribio also argues the importance of the Academia in shaping Spanish cinema, stating, the Goya awards are a central feature of Spanish film culture. Spanish and foreign critics use the adjective ‘Goya-winning’ to endorse films and performances for prospective national and international audiences; Goyas are in turn routinely mentioned as part of the publicity (Spanish Film Cultures 36). In a sense, these categories refer us back to the complicated question regarding the term popular. Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich state that the term implies a distinction or opposition between sections of society—‘the popular’ and ‘the elite’. In this way this definition of ‘popular’ depends on the existence of something, which by implication, is ‘not popular’ (2). Nevertheless, as I shall see, the dichotomy in Spanish cinema is not necessarily rigid.

I have divided the study into three periods: 2000–04, 2005–09, and 2009–15 (at this writing, the last year for which statistics for Spanish cinema are available from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport). The division is somewhat arbitrary: I have always liked the Spanish term lustro, meaning a period of five years, which is a term I first learned from Joan Manuel Serrat’s song Tío Alberto (Uncle Alberto) on his famous Mediterráneo album. At the end of each chapter, I have concluding remarks on the films of the lustro. I conclude this study with an examination of trends in the millennium, and I go beyond the winners to show how the runners-up in each category confirm our conclusions.

I have quoted dialog from the films in English translation, using the official subtitles where available, and noting, where pertinent, variants from the subtitles. To make the book more accessible, I have also quoted criticism in Spanish or French in English. I also refer to the movie posters, since as John Ellis observes, An idea of the film is widely circulated and promoted, an idea which can be called the ‘narrative image’ of the film, the cinema industry’s anticipatory reply to the question, ‘What is the film like?’ (31), and posters form an important part of the marketing campaigns.

Notes

1While working on the index for this book, I received the latest monograph by Núria Triana-Toribio, Spanish Film Cultures: The Making and Unmaking of Spanish Cinema, which contains a chapter title, And the Winner Is… As with her other studies, I incorporate her incisive insights into my analysis.

2The Academy and the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport, which publishes box-office data, list the names of films with their Spanish titles. However, The Others, The Secret Life of Words, The Oxford Murders, The Impossible, Agora, and Fast and Furious 6 were all filmed in English. When referring to the Academy’s and the Ministry’s information in the Appendices, I list their Spanish titles first (Los otros, La vida secreta de las palabas, Los crímenes de Oxford, Lo imposible, and Ágora, respectively; Fast and Furious 6 is in English), and at the beginning of each film’s analysis, I note the two titles. Otherwise, I use their English titles to underscore the transnational nature of cinema in Spain today.

Chapter 1

2000–04

Goya: Best Film of 2000

El Bola (Pellet, 2000), directed by Achero Mañas, was the surprise winner at the Goya awards, taking Best Picture, Best New Director, Best Original Script (Mañas and Verónica Fernández), and Best New Actor (Juan José Ballesta as Pablo, a.k.a. El Bola or Pellet, because he always carries a ball-bearing for good luck). This film addresses a social problem in Spain: domestic abuse of children. Director Mañas comments that El Bola is a story of two boys […] from two completely opposite worlds ("Así se hizo El Bola), and for Matthew J. Marr, the film shows the progressive representation of a socially expressive and emotionally sensitive model of adolescent masculinity (33–34). The film poster has the title written in screaming" capital letters placed vertically and irregularly, connoting the problems faced by the protagonist. A close-up of his face appears on the right half of the poster, but with only half of his face showing; this again emphasizes the thematic divisions of the film; in addition, the image shows a bandaged eyebrow and a bloodied lip, hinting at the theme of physical abuse.

The opening scene of the film establishes a latent danger for the boys: the 12-year-old El Bola and his friends playing a game on the railroad tracks. They place two objects in the middle of the track, and as the train approaches, two boys run just in front of it to grab the objects. This game’s lethal possibility is confirmed when we discover that a boy was hit and killed by a train the previous year. Jorge González del Pozo calls the train tracks an allegory of the violence and constant danger that Bola lives in (Al cerrar 55). This game is the basis of a serious talk by José (Alberto Jiménez), the father of Bola’s new friend Alfredo (Pablo Galán), which constitutes a contrast in parenting with Bola’s father Mariano (Manuel Morón).

The friendship between Alfredo and Bola is solidified in a trip to an amusement park: both boys talk about their manhood in hair-raising rides, but there is never a danger of actually losing a life as in running in front of a speeding train. The montage of the two boys having a good time (their smiling faces often shot in close-up) on various rides and eating at the snack bar establishes the friendship between Pablo and the newcomer. Santiago Fouz-Hernández comments, After the rides […] they have something to eat together and enjoy having a chat, something that Pablo did not experience with his school acquaintances (231), and Jennifer Smith underscores the bonding between the two boys: With the pressure of the male peer group removed, for the first time in his life, Pablo is able to let down his emotional guard, open up, and experience true friendship (237). Smith also notes that although El Bola shows training in hegemonic masculinity through male peer groups where pecking orders are formed by demonstrations of manliness (229), Alfredo’s later refusal to play the dangerous bottle game provides a positive model of behavior for Pablo; Alfredo calls it a fucking stupid game and even resists the insults to his masculinity when the game leader says he has no balls.

There is a marked contrast between the two families in the film. For Fouz-Hernández, Pablo’s family represents an older model of the family in Spain: the father works all day at his own modest business, helped by Pablo […]; the mother is a devoted housewife, and the grandmother also lives in the house (227). While Pablo works in his father’s hardware store, a customer says she wishes she were young like Pablo, because he has no problems, but the look on his face belies the claim. The relationship between Pablo and his father shows no love. Jennifer Smith notes that Mariano communicates with his son by giving him commands (232) as we see in the scene when his son says hello and the father answers, Grab the bag that is out there. As Mariano and his son walk down the street, the father’s admonition, Look at me when I talk to you, is spoken in a cold-hearted tone, establishing in a subtle way the negative and abusive father–son relationship that grows throughout the film. When the family returns from the cemetery after visiting the grave of an older son who died, Pablo asks if he can go hang out with his friend, and father objects, saying, On the anniversary of his brother’s death?, complaining that he wants to hang out in the fucking street (a mild example of the father’s foul language that also grows throughout), adding, It wouldn’t kill to stay home for once, a statement that in syntagmatic relationship with later events, is tinged with irony. When Mariano later goes to pick up Pablo at school and the boy is not there, his comment, That son of a bitch, increases the father’s animosity toward his son. After Pablo returns home from hanging out with Alfredo, Mariano erupts, Get your ass in here, asshole. I’m going to kick your ass. The next time you ditch class you’re fucking dead. The father’s foul language and the physical threat represent an environment of fear that grows throughout the film. As his father grabs him, pushes him inside, and shuts the door, we hear his ranting from the hallway, which constitutes a visual displacement of the violence at this juncture, thus forming part of a crescendo that culminates in a climactic scene near the end of the film. The door is an important symbol in the film, dividing private and public spaces. According to Jorge González del Pozo,

Mañas proposes a structure and narrative with equilibrium between the public and the private. That is to say, he presents a dynamic between what is known and what is ignored, between what is shown and what is hidden in the family.

(Al cerrar 52)

Alfredo’s family provides a different model for Pablo. Lorraine Ryan notes that José personifies the Spanish new father […] who is caring and respectful toward his son, Alfredo, and thoughtfully explains his viewpoint to him, rather than enforcing it (94). And when José visits Alfredo’s godfather in the hospital where he is dying of AIDS, it shows him free of the homophobia that is pivotal in the formation of violent forms of masculinity (Smith, La Violencia 233). An invitation to accompany Alfredo and his family on a trip to the mountains provides a break in the dramatic crescendo and offers a contrast between the two family models. The long shot of the family and friends Laura (Ana Wagener) and Alfonso (Javier Lago) sitting at a stone picnic table with close-ups of a smiling Pablo while extradiegetic music covers their chatting manifests an ideal family life filled with companionship and love, a stark contrast to Pablo’s home. The panning shot of the mountain range provides a sense of peace, and as the pan continues, passing over each member of the family before ending with Pablo, it gives the impression that he is part of this new-found household. Jorge González del Pozo states, Pablo’s gradual acceptance into Alfredo’s family and friends is what allows him to realize that other family environments exist where violence, tension, and repression are not a daily occurrence (Al cerrar 53). A sudden rainstorm causes everyone to get wet, and when they go to Laura’s house, to get into dry clothes, Alfredo sees the evidence of Pablo’s abuse: a red bruise on his side. However, when Alfredo asks, How did that happen?, Pablo lies, saying, I fell the other day. Marr notes that this scene represents a transitional point in the film since the evidence of Pablo’s condition becomes public, as Mañas pauses on a superbly crafted close-up of a silent and vulnerable Pablo, who slowly raises a distressed gaze toward his friend to great dramatic effect (47).

The contrast in the two families intensifies when Pablo arrives home from the excursion, and Mariano chides his son, saying, I don’t want you with those people again and he imposes the patriarchal authority with the justification, because I said so. Mariano then leaves Pablo alone in the bathroom, and in a close-up, Pablo says, Son of a bitch. I hope you die. A shot of his father’s shoes in the doorway before the fade-out is another example of how Mañas displaces the violence once again, using here the visual synecdoche followed by the connotative fade-out. The following shot of the classroom where Alfredo looks at Pablo’s empty desk intensifies our suspicions, as does the information that Pablo has been out of class for an entire week; his schoolmate says that Pablo’s father probably beat him up, a fact that everyone knows. Mañas again uses the apartment door as an important element in the mise-en-scène when Alfredo goes to Pablo’s home, since the boy does not open the door to let him in. Instead, we hear Pablo’s voice as the camera slowly dollies in to the scene, and we only see him from behind, thus making scars on his face not visible as he rests his head on his hand on the door, a gesture of defeat. Pablo can only say, Please leave and don’t come back. Leave or I’ll be in trouble again, a statement made out of fear. Alfredo’s query, Your old man hit you, right?, contains a question tag that assumes the truth, and Pablo’s silent response is pregnant with meaning.

An important theme in the film is the question of to what extent one should be actively involved in a situation of abuse. When Alfredo tells his parents about Pablo’s predicament, José decides to verify the situation, thus getting involved in Pablo’s wellbeing. However, when he visits the hardware store, Mariano lies to him, saying Pablo has missed school because of tonsillitis and is with his grandmother; the lie is quickly shown to be false when José sees Pablo in the street. A conversation between José and the boys again forms a contrast with Pablo’s home life: José admonishes them for playing the dangerous train game, saying to Alfredo, If you get killed you’ll kill me, your mother, your brother, and everyone else who loves you. Life has too much to offer. Life is already too short. The death of Alfredo’s godfather to AIDS makes this speech even more poignant. And when he admonishes Alfredo, Don’t pout. I’m telling you that I love you, it forms a stark contrast with the lack of affection in Bola’s home, further underscored by José’s comment to Pablo: That goes for you, too. I’m talking to you as a son. Since Laura tells José there is nothing they can do about Pablo’s situation, because they do not have proof of the abuse, José devises a way to obtain it. José runs a tattoo parlor, and he tells both boys to come over to him, and he has his son take off his shirt so he can give him a tattoo on his back. It seems like a strategy so that he can later get Pablo to take off his shirt as well, and then he would be able to see the bruises and scars there. For Santiago Fouz-Hernández, Alfredo’s father’s job as a tattooist and Pablo’s physical suffering provide many opportunities for the boys to discuss and draw attention to their own and other bodies and As Mañas acknowledges […], Alfredo’s tattoo (done by his dad in a loving ritual) offers a sharp contrast with Pablo’s bruises, also done by his father but in a very different context since Pablo’s marks represent hatred and frustration, whereas Alfredo’s tattoo is a symbol of love, growing up, and bonding with his dad (233). Matthew J. Marr concurs, saying that by giving his son a tattoo, José carries out a ritual of revelation signaling his love for Alfredo, one which additionally seems to consecrate the boy’s imminent passage out of adolescent liminality into early manhood (47).

The construction of the plot gives us the most gripping scene that shows the violence that has been displaced throughout the film. The scene begins with the father’s interrogation when Pablo arrives home: Can’t you ever be on time? It escalates with Mariano wanting to know where he was, and when Pablo answers with a question, his father’s response