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The Devil's Backbone
review by Carrie Gorringe, 21 September
2001 26th
Toronto International Film Festival
Best known for
films that blend horror and fantasy, such as Cronos and Mimic,
Guillermo del Toro now adds historical background to his trademark
mix in The Devil's Backbone(El Espinazo del Diablo).
It is 1939, the end of three years of bloody civil war in Spain, and
General Franco's right-wing Nationalists are poised to defeat the
left-wing Republican forces. A ten-year-old boy named Carlos
(Fernando Tielve), the son of a fallen Republican war hero, is left
by his tutor in an orphanage in the middle of nowhere. The orphanage
is run by a curt but considerate headmistress named Carmen (Marisa
Paredes) and a kindly Professor Casares (Eduardo Noriega), both of
whom are sympathetic to the doomed Republican cause. Despite their
concern for him, and his gradual triumph over the usual schoolhouse
bully, Carlos never feels completely comfortable in his new
environment. First of all, there was that initial encounter with the
orphanage's nasty caretaker, Jacinto (Federico Luppi), who reacts
even more violently when anyone is caught looking around a
particular storage room -- the one with the deep well. Second, and
more inexplicable, is the presence of a ghost, one of the former
occupants of the orphanage named Sante. Not long after Carlos'
arrival, Sante latches onto Carlos, badgering him incessantly at
night and gloomily intoning, "Many of you will die." As if
that wasn't enough to keep the orphanage's occupants in an
unrelenting state of terror, there's the unexploded bomb that
dominates the orphanage's courtyard, still ticking away; With the
orphanage left defenseless by its isolation, and the swift
progression of Franco's troops, the ghost's prediction seems
depressingly accurate. Nevertheless, with every step of the plot, it
becomes apparent that the ghost's predictions as to who (or what)
will die, the real source of danger and even the definition of death
itself may be more ambiguous than first thought.
The
urge to call The Devil's Backbone an allegory for the
cruelties inflicted upon the innocent during the Spanish Civil War
is at once appropriate, but also one that is far too facile an
interpretation. Once the audience figures this out -- and does so
fairly early in the proceedings -- the film appears as though it is
about to unfold as a typical thriller that has had a thick layer of
high-flown, if obvious, symbolism slathered over it in order to make
it respectable. The consequences of allowing the historical and the
narrative to act in parallel often leads to the sacrificing of
history in favor of melodrama (The Hughes Bros.' execrable Ripper
film, From Hell, is the latest dismal example of this
all-too-common occurrence.). However, as with all films about
historical events that move above the mediocre, the real
entertainment should lie in watching how a filmmaker can keep both
history and story firmly in control. Director/co-writer del Toro
accomplishes this by taking the well-worn conclusion that historical
and personal events are affected, however intentionally, through a
psychological blindness that can be conscious and/or unconscious,
and encases the good/evil dichotomy within it. Del Toro accomplishes
this, with the assistance of cinematographer Guillermo Novarro,
through the use of extreme color saturation, alternating between
dark, dreary interiors and scalding bright exteriors as if in an
oscillating structure. Thus, the color in this film does not follow
a neat symbolic pattern; evil and good exist equally well alongside
each other in both darkness and light. The overall look of the film
is not unlike the structure of an exemplary essay or even a melody,
one with a clearly discernible "pulsing" rhythm underneath
the visuals (this style -- perhaps roughly described as an attempt
to anthropomorphize the visual and narrative structures -- is a
predominant feature of del Toro's previous features, Cronos and
Mimic). The Devil's Backbone is a remarkable example
of how a filmmaker can make the seemingly insurmountable task of
translating historical circumstances into a film in which true and
fictional horror coincide so cleanly appear easy.
Click on the titles below to read the reviews.
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Directed by:
Guillermo del Toro
Starring:
Marisa Paredes
Eduardo Noriega
Federico Luppi
Fernando Tielve
Íñigo Garcés
Irene Visedo
Francisco Maestre
José Manuel Lorenzo
Junio Valverde
Written
by:
Guillermo del Toro
Antonio Trashorras
David Muñoz
Rated:
R - Restricted
Under 17
require
accompanying
parent
or adult
guardian.
FULL
CREDITS
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