Victor Erice's second feature film was a long time coming: ten years after Spirit of the Beehive. High in quality but medium-low in excitement, it is again a discreetly interior drama, with again some interest in the insatiable sponge of a child's curiosity, and again some interest in the enchantments of the Silver Screen -- although in this case it's not the child, but her father, who is enchanted thereby. (And it's not a real film, but a perfect imitation of a black-and-white Fifties melodrama, that casts the spell.) Every bit as beautiful as Beehive -- as quiet, as placid, as precise in image and sound -- but somehow not as completely cinematic. Too much of the information is supplied by a bookish first-person narration, and too much of a third person's private life is made accessible to the aforesaid first person. Omero Antonutti, Sonsoles Aranguren, Aurore Clement. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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