Idyll's End
FILM: Butterfly
DIRECTOR: Jose Luis Cuerda
STARRING: Manuel Lozano, Gonzalo Uriarte
GRADE: A-
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MONCHO (MANUEL LOZANO) LEARNS FROM HIS INSPIRING TEACHER DON GREGORIO
(FERNANDO FERNAN GOMEZ) IN BUTTERFLY.
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In Nazi Germany, schoolchildren were encouraged to spy on their parents and
report any variance from party ideology. Meanwhile, in Stalin's Russia,
communist true believers confessed their failings and cooperated in their own
exile and even execution in fealty to their Marxist creed. George Orwell wrote
about this surrender of self to state in his seminal 1984. Big Brother
watched, and everyone worried. Some achieved the requisite abnegation of
individual ego; most protected themselves by pretending to do so. Totalitarian
government consciously undermined all natural identity with family or church or
local community or lifelong friend in order to focus all loyalty solely in the
state. History became fluid, constantly revised to reflect contemporary
allegiances or their opposite. Police endeavored to exert control even over
private thought.
In the devastating end of Orwell's novel, lovers turn on each
other, abandoning that most sacred of human instincts, crying out to save
themselves by having their nightmares perpetrated on each other. Fictionalized
in a forbidding future by Orwell, lived across the globe in the 1930s,
revisited in Pol Pot's Cambodia in the 1970s and Saddam Hussein's Iraq of the
1990s, this is the world that Jose Luis Cuerda's Butterfly spies on the
horizon at the beginning of what appears at first glance a sweet coming-of-age
tale.
It was written by Rafael Azcona and based on a collection of short
stories by Manuel Rivas. Set in the early and mid-1930s, Butterfly is
the story of a wide-eyed Spanish boy named Moncho (Manuel Lozano), who is
afraid to begin his years in school because he's heard that the teacher is
mean. Moncho has grown up in the small town of Galicia in the northwest
corner of the Iberian Peninsula, where his father (Gonzalo Uriarte) is the
local tailor and the family is relatively prosperous.
Moncho's home is full of love, and he clearly gets different
strengths from the different members of his family. His father is an
enthusiastic Republican who believes in the nascent democracy that has only
just come to his country. Moncho's mother (Uxia Blanco) is a devout Catholic
who instills in her son the importance of religious faith. Moncho's cherished
older brother Andres (Alexis de Los Santos) is a budding artist, a musician who
practices the saxophone faithfully until all in one magical moment he can play
it with a haunting sweetness.
Moncho's father teaches him to read when he's very young, but
despite this head start, the boy is still afraid of school, and his first day
proves traumatizing when the other children tease him before he grasps that
they are merely rowdy and not really cruel. Moncho's fear of school is quickly
overcome due to the gentle attentions of Don Gregorio (the legendary Fernando
Fernan Gomez delivering an inspirational performance of profound dignity), his
aging and always-caring teacher. Don Gregorio helps to socialize Moncho, and he
reveals to the child a heretofore unknown world of wonder. Don Gregorio
particularly loves to teach natural science by taking his pupils into the
fields outside town and beyond them into the woods that anchor the hills,
which rise in the near distance in all directions. In this idyllic,
isolated, peaceful world, Moncho learns from his teacher about the majesty of
the plants and animals with whom he shares the earth.
Outside of school, Moncho and his best friend, Roque (Tamar Novas),
learn about other things. Together, they learn about sex by spying on a local
lout named Otis (Guillermo Toledo), who is having a torrid affair with
Carmina (Elena Fernandez), the town slut. Elsewhere, Moncho experiences the
first buds of his own romantic instincts as he makes friends and ultimately
picks flowers for a pretty girl his age named Aurora (Lara Lopez).
Very much of this will recall Federico Fellini's Amarcord
which shares Butterfly's time setting, its sense of pristine
youth and the wonder of growing up, and its belief, no doubt at least partly
manufactured by the selectiveness of memory, that there was a time when the
world was almost perfect. Like Amarcord, this film revels in the
eccentric. Carmina, we discover along with Moncho, who only barely understands
what he's watching, can only become aroused in the presence of her yapping dog,
Tarzan. And also like Amarcord, Butterfly knows that small traditional
towns were nonetheless infinitely complicated places full of private agendas
and shocking secrets. Moncho learns, for instance, to be wary of judging
people. For it develops that the randy Carmina is actually his own half-sister,
his father's daughter from an unmarried dalliance in his youth.
In the end, however, Butterfly bears a far more somber
message than does Amarcord, which deliberately basks in its own
nostalgia and holds the fascists, which appear occasionally, to the fringes of
its story. Fascism was ugly and vicious, Fellini seems to submit, but it didn't
manage to ruin his childhood. Perhaps Fellini could crowd Mussolini's thugs to
the edges of his story because democracy returned to Italy at the end of World
War II. And perhaps Cuerda and like-minded countrymen see Franco's dragoons as
far more menacing because they ruled Spain for an additional 30 years.
Butterfly is a story of sweet childhood lived out under a thundercloud
of looming oppression that finally bursts in a flood of appalling devastation.
Despite the fact that in the early going, we meet Don Avelino
(Jesus Castejon), a rich man with a sour disposition and a contempt for the
"license" of democracy, the narrative developments that follow still
inadequately prepare us for the picture's last quarter hour. The film doesn't
handle the passage of time well at all. Five years pass from the fall of the
monarchy in 1931 until the beginning of the civil war in 1936 that eventually
would topple the republic. And yet young Moncho, a first-grader at the outset,
doesn't age at all. And obviously, there's a tremendous difference between the
perceptions and maturity of a 6-year-old and that of an 11-year-old child
presumably on the cusp of puberty. Moreover and more important, Moncho's
family isn't made privy to examples of atrocity that might trigger the
terrified nature of their ultimate response to political crisis.
That's not to say, however, that this movie doesn't work in the
final analysis. For it does -- quite magnificently and despite its narrative
lacunae. It works in significant part because Cuerda has discovered a
monumentally talented young actor in Lozano, whose face is as expressive as any
I've ever seen. And it works in major part because the story's symbolic subtext
is so artfully executed. We may see the whole of Spain embodied in the tiny
town of Galicia, so distant from the hotbed politics of Madrid. And we may see
its divisions embodied even in Moncho's nuclear family. We can see beauty
represented by the music Andres learns to play, faith in the mother's religious
devotion, a love of freedom in the father's political beliefs and a vast
national potential in Moncho's intelligence, decency and capacity to learn.
These elements can fit together to form a nation as
they fit together to
form the love in Moncho's family.
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LIFE DURING WARTIME: MONCHO (MANUEL LOZANO) GROWS UP DURING THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR IN JOSE LUIS CUERDA'S BUTTERFLY.
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But some of these elements are largely powerless, and others are at
odds. Andres possesses beauty, but beauty alone cannot achieve even its own
ends. Through his music, Andres can speak to the oppressed, as represented by
an abused Chinese housewife held almost in bondage by her cruel husband, but
neither Andres nor his music can free this woman from her suffering. Father's
politics and mother's religion, meanwhile, need not be opposed, but they
sometimes are and most certainly were during the Spanish civil war when the
Catholic church supported Franco's "Nationalists" against the forces of the
Republicans.
In the characters of the mother and father, screenwriter Azcona and
director Cuerda resolutely refuse to settle for uncomplicated stereotypes.
Mother is no pious fanatic, and father is no democratic saint. Mother's beliefs
might be too narrowly focused and ultimately unforgiving, but father's lack of
self-control and ultimate cowardice illustrate Cuerda's key point that
democracy requires both rectitude and fortitude.
In this film's absolutely shattering conclusion, however fast time
moves without changing young Moncho, the war comes with a shocking suddenness
that snaps off the light of youth like a flower pinched at the neck and
crushed in a coarse hand. And fear rises across the land like the shrouding
mist of swamp fog, narrowing as if in an instant human objective to that of
survival alone. In an atmosphere of peril, in an era of abrupt violence, people
take shelter, psychological as well as physical. Their actions are
understandable even as they are so often objectionable. The cruel thrive,
and the innocent suffer. Vast potential is squandered. People act and are
forced to act in ways that they can perhaps never live down.
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