Eloy de la Iglesia may, at first, seem an unlikely subject for a tribute, but the radical Basque-born director's films are now enjoying a critical rehabilitation which places him in the big league of contemporary Spanish satirists. John Hopewell reports
Suggest just a few years ago that the San Sebastián would be dedicating a tribute to the Basque-born Eloy de la Iglesia, and you would have had seen many festival wiseacres raising both proverbial eyebrows. In Spain at least, the prolific De la Iglesia, who made 19 films from 1966 to 1985, isn't even little-known. To the contrary, he's been infamous for all the most inappropriate, non-tribute things: gutter-film sensationalism, in-your face moralising, OTT exaggerations, a straight-to-video chicness, proley genres such as melodrama and an obsession with drugs and sex.
Many Spanish critics could have waxed elegant on the awfulness of De la Iglesia. But instead of writing about him, they merely wrote him off. But not every one. From the early 80s, more radical critics in Spain began to probe beneath De la Iglesia's superficiality, and find a enriching depth.
With Carlos Saura and Manuel Gutiérrez Aragon, De la Iglesia is the Spanish director of Spain's transition from a kitsch dictatorship to a modern democracy. De la Iglesia's first film, Cuadrilátero (1966), coincides with the first stuttering liberalisation of an increasingly doddery regime. De la Iglesia's last film, a gay recasting of Henry James' classic, The Turn of the Screw (1985) came three years after the assumption of power by Felipe González's socialists.
Under Franco, De la Iglesia made violent social protest films, including the outstanding La semana del asesino (The Week of the Murderer, 1972) and Una gota de sangre para morir amando (A Drop of Blood to Die Loving, 1973), favourably compared by José Luis Guarner to A Clockwork Orange. Since Los placeres ocultos (Hidden Pleasures, 1976), De la Iglesia tended towards a more realistic style, combining social melodrama with an increasing sophistication. Los placeres ocultos, El diputado (The Deputy, 1978) and Otra vuelta de tuerca (The Turn of the Screw, 1985) all turn on the main character's homosexuality.
The first contrasts the fate of homosexuals from different social classes. The second attacks the hypocrisy of a Spanish democracy which parades its liberties but rejects homosexuals. The last, and most ambitious, an elegant adaptation of Henry James' novel, changes James' governess to a governor, implies a latent homosexual attraction between him and his precocious male ward, and suggests that the ghosts the governor sees are really phantasma, the product, like the governor's horror at his own latent homosexuality, of a warped, repressive education in a seminary.
De la Iglesia's family dramas also show increasing sophistication. In Colegas (Mates), 1982) family hostility and unemployment push two young friends into delinquency. Hero José refuses to marry his girlfriend, even though she is pregnant, and he loves her, and this is presented as a positive decision. El pico (The Shoot, 1983) is more ambiguous. The family still makes for oppression. At his son's eighteenth birthday party, a Civil Guard celebrates the boy's independence from one social institution (the family) by proposing his his membership of another (the Civil Guard), getting him (by now, in a strident irony typical of De la Iglesia) to dress up in his Civil Guard uniform and put on a moustache, emblem in Spain of right-wing authoritarianism.
On the other hand, the film records the love which the family encourages between parents and children, and it is this ambivalence which makes its ending so excellent. The father, catching his son with heroin, drives him to the top of a cliff and throws the heroin, wrapped up in his Civil Guard's three-cornered hat, into the sea. His responsibility as a Civil Guard is subordinated not only to his love for his son but also to the survival of his family, arguably a stronger force for oppression. It is a salutary irony.
Eloy de la Iglesia's films also have a political cogency. Navajeros (Knifefighters, 1980) is a rampant melodrama with stock characters (such as a Mexican whore with a golden heart with whom the protagonist has pointedly untraumatised six for much of the film), simplistic moralising, scandal-mongering (policemen who are pimps, visit male prostitutes, and curse Spain's democracy). And it takes an extreme case (the life of a celebrated Spanish delinquent, El Jaro) to an extreme end; the protagonist's corpse with shotgun wounds in head and face. Never has the new Spain been shown so brusquely.
De la Iglesia uses stylisation in Navajeros to assert the attraction of a youth culture which is ineradicably opposed to middle-class culture. To point up this separation, when Jaro and his gang rob pedestrians, raid phone boxes and smash windows, De la Iglesia accompanies the images with the graceful music of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. In another pointed incongruity, as they escape from the police, Jaro and his gang trample sniggering through a ballet class for the daughters of the rich. The attractiveness of the youth culture rests mostly with El Jaro himself. Disdaining realism, De la Iglesia plays to the strength of the melodrama hero, the way 'he greets every situation with an unwavering single impulse which absorbs his whole personality.
If there is danger, he is courageous untroubled by cowardice, weakness or doubt, self-interest or thought of self-preservation.' Jaro dies while walking fearlessly, knife in hand, towards a middle-class housekeeper who holds a shotgun on him. The ending confirms both class enmity and that total absorption with the moment which made Spanish delinquents and the culture they embodied such attractive figures for Spaniards troubled by their past and the doubts of desencanto.
La estanquera de Vallecas (1986) is De La Iglesia's last film. But now he's back, and at San Sebastián, having wrestled with a drug addiction which cost him the lives of friends (including the superbly unaffected José Luis Manzano, who played Jaro and starred in the two Pico films), a home and ten years. He's dying to get started again, he says; he can't understand why he's been away.
'It's not the fault of a mirror if it shows a virgin that she's pregnant,' satirist George Grosz once said. Eloy de la Iglesia has had a habit of getting up people's noses, and under their nails. Tributes normally come late; this one, from an (well, one person's) international point of view at least, seems thoroughly justified.
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