Belle Epoque. - movie reviews

Commonweal, June 3, 1994 by Richard Alleva

If there was ever a movie that announced its destination long before arrival, it's Belle Epoque, which won this year's best foreign film Academy Award.

Fleeing the civil strife of Madrid in the early 1930s, a young army deserter, Fernando, takes refuge in the country house of an old squire, Don Manolo, and soon encounters the gent, s four gorgeous daughters--Clara, Violetta, Rocio, and Luz. Before the film is twenty minutes old, we know, we are meant to know, that Fernando and the youngest, Luz, are destined for each other. Luz knows this, too, but our hero doesn't: he's ready to fall in love with all four women. The progress of this story is the erotic trek of Fernando into and out of the arms of each of the older sisters until he finally arrives at La Luz at the end of the tunnel of love.

It's a comedy of predestination. Writer-director Femando Trueba wants us to know in advance how it will all turn out so that we may delight in the details of the romantic journey. The very predictability is meant to be part of our pleasure as we bask in the summery atmosphere of the countryside and take our time savoring the beauty of the women, Fernando, s charming ineptitude, the eccentricities of household and neighbors, and the civilized, unhurried pace at which life is taken. It's a leisurely picnic of a movie.

Perhaps I'm just not a picnic person. My metabolism runs a little too fast for such relaxations and, since I knew exactly where the plot was going, l wanted more surprises in sheer execution: more piquancy in the dialogue, greater subtleties of framing and editing, acting that was not only as adroit as it is but downright virtuosic (though Fernando Fernan Gomez as Don Manolo is magisterial). The first erotic encounter is the best--a precarious, cross-dressed grappling with the lesbian-inclined Violetta, but the subsequent entanglements seem incited by push-button. Trueba himself may have become bored by the machinery of his plot because just before the coming together of Luz and Fernando, the filmmaker completely shifts his focus to the arrival of Don Manolo's opera singer wife and her manager-lover. The subsequent triangle of husband-wife-lover could have composed an enriching subplot but here functions only to kill time before the (mostly) happy ending arrives.

But Belle Epoque is not all joyous sensuality. The title itself is both ironic and wistful. Trueba sees the early days of the Spanish Republic as the "beautiful age" before the triumph of Franco's dictatorship. And, to remind us of the offstage political tragedy even as we enjoy the onstage farce, Trueba bookends the lighthearted sexiness of Fernando's escapades with two disturbing episodes. At the beginning, the young deserter innocently incites the mutual slaughter of two members of the National Guard. In this brilliantly staged scene that successfully blends farce and horror, the fact that the guards are related to each other by marriage echoes the internecine nature of the Spanish tragedy. Near the end, the village priest hangs himself, apparently because he, s been reading too much Miguel de Unamuno. l found this totally preposterous, but perhaps that's because I've always found Unamuno rather bracing.