Cria!

I would disagree with a lot of the reviews here saying that the kids’ aunt is Franco. She isn’t. She isn’t mean, she isn’t all that strict at all I feel, though definitely leans in that direction. It can’t be easy, it can’t be easy to have your nieces orphaned, to have to take up the responsibility of taking care of them, on top of taking care of a mother who’s wheelchair-bound and unable to speak. Her coldness at times is incredibly natural, and the film I don’t think depicts her as a villain at all, there’s too many points of tenderness through the cold for that to be the case.  Franco, or Franco-ism, has to be the father. He’s an abusive man. A man who fought on the side of the nationalists, and then the nazis, a man who took his wife away from her possible future as a pianist to sit in a home, alone, all day with nothing but to wait for him. There’s a review on this website that says the girls make an effort to acclimate to a house which is now claustrophobic, but I don’t think that’s true. The house was always claustrophobic, how could it not be? When a little girl in her own fantasies can’t help but pretend she’s listening to her parents argue again, to her mom crying for some sort of affectionate, and to a father who’s obviously disinterested.  These are girls whose lives are surrounded by so much misery. It’s hard for me as an adult to process it now, I can’t imagine at that age even coming close to it, but as a man who was a kid who also had to deal with fairly heavy topics at an early age, there’s so much honesty in the way these girls cope. Everything from Ana’s anger towards her aunt for filling the role left open by her mom, to her fantasies where she wishes her mom would scold her for being up late and tell her to go to bed (this specifically reads like her reliving a memory again and again) come together to really understand how grief, and a life defined by it, and by death, would come to affect a generation. How growing up around so much pain and so much death could have you obsess over it, and even come to fantasize about it.  These girls have no autonomy over their lives or their decisions, they’re only surrounded by photos and by ghosts, and for Ana, death becomes a way in which she can express herself, in which she can rebel, like putting mud on her face or clinging onto her father’s gun. Death, even murder, seems to her like an ultimate escape to freedom. Yet, she’s still just a little girl, a little girl who shares a bed with her little sister, and a room with her big sister. Who has a maid clean for her and comb her hair. Her can of poison is just baking soda, summer’s over, and she has to go back to school.  Her going back to school seems like the release she’s been waiting for. It’s a place to socialize and to learn. On the way there she walks under graffiti calling for libertad and her favorite song plays. As a viewer it felt like the bad dream was over, and maybe for Spain it was too.