PRESS

Film:

Guernica, Arrabal's Civil War

By RICHARD EDER

Fernando Arrabal is a 43-yearold child who sits on the floor and tells totally made-up stories about the outside world. They eddy and change color, from ridiculous to obscene to puerile; but stars keep falling into them.
As a playwright, Mr. Arrabal has his own lodging in the Theater of the Absurd; it is called the Theater of Panic. As a novice film maker, he charges the medium head on.
There is a lot of damage any halfway competent movie director could have warned him about; and a measure of splintered brilliance that no halfway competent movie director could have dreamed of.

In "Guernica," which opened at the 68th Street Playhouse yesterday, Mr. Arrabal, an exiled Spaniard, has given us his Civil War. It is grotesque and painful, absurdly obvious in parts, rough and chaotic almost throughout. It is almost totally onesided and yet in its own highly personal way it is authentic. It is the Civil War as nightmare, but its obscenity and ferocity are metaphors for tenderness.
The setting is an imaginary village Called Villa Romero, set in Extremadura, the most barren and backward of Spain's regions. With no subtlety at all, the film sets out its cast of characters.
Vandale, played by Mariangela Melato, is a beautiful hermit, halfwitch. Count Cerralbo is the rural landlord who rails against the Republic and the lost of his authority. He has three brutal sons who ride around assaulting peasant woman and meeting in a cellar to plan their part in the Franco uprising.
The fourth son, Goya, is a Surrealist artist who despises politics. He breaks up first-communion services by telling the children the wine is poisoned, paints obscene crucifixion scenes and sits through a scolding by his father while masturbating quietly into his brandy glass.

The Nationalist rising takes place, but in Villa Romero it fails. The landlord's sons flee to join Franco's troops, the landlord climbs into the village school and is hidden by the schoolmaster, a Republican Airman but an advocate of non-violence.
Vandale and Goya flee separately for France. They meet in the town of Guernica, fall in love instantly (a dove flies in slow motion from one to the other to symbolize it), and are separated when Guernica is bombed.
She returns to Villa Romero and, no longer a hermit, rallies the villagers to fight the oncoming Franco troops. He gets an airplane and machine-guns the besiegers' canons. Ultimately the village falls, Vandale and Goya are made prisoner, and he is tortured. She manages to escape and free him. They climb to the mountains and against an enormous setting sun, embrace: symbols of a future Spanish liberation.
That is the plot, with all its farfetched melodrama. The film's strength is elsewhere; in images that express the savage yearnings and excesses that were the fuel of a terrible civil war. Many of the villagers are dwarfs: Arrabal uses them to symbolize the oppression of a people. "Now we will be like everyone," one dwarf declares ­ it is a flash of pain ­ when the village invades the landlord's castle.
There are other blinding sights. Children move in a slow-motion procession up a hill; the soundtrack alternates their guttural chanting with an anthem; the effect is to bind up in one image churchgoing and churchburning Spain. There is an unbearable but inspired scene after the Republic is defeated: a bullfighter, using all the gestures and postures of his art, fights and kills five dwarfs lashed to wheel-barrows. The audience is the army, the church, the upper classes; the national anthem plays.

These things, intolerable as they may seem, succeed beyond all reasonable expectations. Many other things fails; and the film's technical carelessness (it is filmed in Italy but even the Italian dubbing is sloppy ­ at one point Miss Melato is speaking Italian and the crowd is answering in Spanish drags it down further.
Miss Melato is a good actress but she doesn't have the force for the role. Her singing of one of the great Civil War songs is almost prim. On the other hand the American actor Ron Faber, playing Goya, makes a first-rate Spaniard.
Rough, ridiculous, arbitrary; "Guernica" is a film designed to make the spectator fight it. The remarkable thing is that it frequently wins.

The Cast

GUERNICA, written and directed by
Fernando Arrabal; produced by Harry
Blum and Federico Mueller; director
of photography , Ramon Suarez; edited
by Renzo Lucidi, at the 68Th Street
Playhouse, at Third Avenue. Running
time : 110 minutes. This films has not
been rated.
Vandale ............ Mariangela Melato
Goya ..................Ron Faber
Count Cerralbo ...Bento Urago
Raphael ............. Cosimo Cinieri
Onesime .............Franco Ressel
Ramiro ................ Mario Novelli
Angel .................Cyril Spiga
Antonio............... Rocco Fontana

* * *

" INESCAPABLY A MAJOR WORK ! IN THE TRADITION OF SURREAL VIOLENCE TO WHICH ALL OTHER WORKS IN THIS TRADITION MUST STAND COMPARISON. "
- Roger Greenspun, N.Y Times

" ONE OF THE ARTISTICALLY IMPORTANT FILMS OF THE YEAR.
AN INTENSELY CREATIVE DRAMA. "
- William Wolf, Cue

" HIGHLY REVOLUTIONARYÖ AWESOME POWER. " - Archer Winston, Post

" AN AUDACIOUS FILM. A PAROXYSM OF ANGUISH, A SCREAM FOR LIBERTY AND PROBABLY ONE OF THE MOST FEROCIOUS VIOLENT FILMS EVER MADE. "
- Amos Vogel, Village Voice

" ONE OF THE BEST PSYCHOLOGICAL FILMS I HAVE EVER SEEN. " - East Village Other

" A FEROCIOUSLY ORIGINAL WORK FILLED WITH GREAT VIOLENCE AND BEAUTY. "
- Thomas Quinn Curtiss, International Herald Tribune

" SURREAL SHOCKER. " - San Francisco Examiner

" IN THE TRADITION OF GOYA. A VIOLENT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINDER OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR. "- San Francisco Chronicle

" A STRIKING EXAMPLE OF CINEMA'S CAPACITY. " - John Richard Parrack, Rolling Stone