by Allan Fish
(Spain 1980 103m) not on DVD
Aka. El Nido
More than a holy fool
d/w Jaime de Armiñán ph Teo Escamilla ed José Luiz Matesanz m Alejandro Masso art Jean-Claude Hoerner
Héctor Alterio (Don Alejandro), Ana Torrent (Goyita), Luis Politti (Don Eladio), Agustin González (sergeant), Patricia Adriani (Marisa), Maria Luisa Ponte (Amparo), Mercedes Alonso (Mercedes), Luisa Rodrigo (Gumer), Ovidi Montllor (Manuel),
It’s over thirty years ago now. I’d only have been nine or ten years old, and was asking a teacher at my primary school – a Catholic one – about Jesus. I remember her looking at me and asking what did I want to know. “Well, you know how Jesus went to the temple when he was about twelve years old…” I muttered. She nodded. “And then we next see him appearing to be baptised by John the Baptist when he was thirty.” Again she nodded. “Where did he go all that time in between?” She just looked puzzled and smiled before saying “you don’t need to worry about that.” You know, the standard religious response to a question they have no answer to, that if we don’t know it can’t be important. I could hardly blame her.
The thought comes back to me twofold as I write about Jaime de Armiñán’s The Nest. No national cinema – or at least no language in cinema – has been as associated with religion and its foibles as Spanish. But the main jogger of that particular memory was of its young star Ana Torrent. We all remember her, that fresh-faced, soulful six year old in The Spirit of the Beehive, and many will recall her two years later in Saura’s Cria Cuervos. Yet then what? According to English language sources she effectively dropped from sight until reappearing at 25 in Medem’s Vacas.
She didn’t disappear, of course, at least not to her native Iberian audiences. Like many young Spanish actresses she was restricted largely to television while Spanish film entered a post-Buñuel doldrums prior to the arrival of Almodóvar, Medem and Luna. What we have in The Nest is Torrent in flux, for me the greatest child actress in the history of the cinema on the verge as it were. The child of Beehive is gone, all but for those eyes, those soulful pits enough to still make one want to give her the biggest hug. And yet this Torrent wouldn’t thank you for it, for she’s no innocent. Here Torrent has rather the spirit of Isabel Telleria, her mischievous elder sister from Beehive.
The Nest follows the sixtyish Don Alejandro, widowed after the death of his wife Isabel, and living only for his games of chess, visits from his old friend the priest – who enjoys his lack of belief as a refreshing change – and imagining himself conducting Haydn’s ‘Creation’ while riding and walking out in a nearby forest. While walking one day, he comes across a feather and a note, the beginning of a treasure hunt and egg and nest chase that leads him finally to a school hall where children are rehearsing Macbeth. He finds that the girl playing Lady Macbeth, Goyita, is the one who has been leaving the messages.
Immediately one has a sense of danger, a fear of a sort of March-October affair that would certainly be uncomfortable viewing. Yet while there is an inescapable sense of the erotic bubbling below the surface, what it’s really about is the loss of innocence and childhood. Alejandro’s love for her is chaste and he just lives to see her because he learns to love life again. She desires blood oaths, wants absolute obedience not out of domineering spite, but because she needs to feel wanted and loved above all. That de Armiñán manages to balance his delicate tale in such a way as to never seem on the verge of queasiness is remarkable indeed, while he’s rewarded by beautiful work from his DP Escamilla’s feeling for the countryside around Salamanca and by the playing of his cast. Adriani is superb in support as an understanding teacher, but it’s the two leads who shine most, with Alterio disarmingly moving and Torrent a delightfully precocious pixie. As delicate as the birds’ nests and eggs they contain, it’s one of the great Spanish films of the post-Franco era and the missing link in the career of little Ana Torrent.
Yep, Torrent alone makes this one essential, though in your excellent review you say a heck of a lot more than that. Another apparent treasure unavailable on DVD or blu-ray.