Political militancy disguised as fairy tales in a film full of symbols and allegories.
With the 70s came openness and intellectual aspirations to Spanish cinema. Directors were now committed left-wing authors and, mainly under the production of Elías Querejeta, and with the direction of Erice or Saura, some of the great masterpieces of Spanish cinema emerged.
But in a world of intellectual pretensions, obsessed with new European currents, much of that cinema is of a pedantry and stupidity that causes blushing and stupor.
At the head of this delirious current we can put this Sleepwalkers by Gutiérrez Aragón.
Ana Belén participated in many of these messes. Her acting abilities are not exceptional, her declamatory voice has a theatrical whiff, but her presence is interesting.
The film has an interesting beginning: left-wing groups demonstrate in front of the security forces resisting the last blows of the dictatorship, and a young woman who works at the National Library begins to suffer headaches.
The headaches are the beginning of a serious neuronal disease and her uncle, a doctor incapacitated by the regime who is now dedicated to staging Strindberg (in English!), and who we are not sure why he lives with Ana's mother, makes a kind of Mephistophelian proposition to the young woman. Ana and her son go to live with her mother and uncle.
Everything begins to become very allegorical and symbolic: the death sentence of the protagonist is identified with the death sentences of the dictatorship, and even eating a plate of lentils seems to mean something else.
Gutiérrez Aragón obviously likes fantasy and theater. There is a book that seems to reproduce personal and political history in a fairy tale style. There is a key that opens the drawer of surprises, and a moon cabinet where the queen and the wizard keep their artifacts. But all this with a more picturesque than functional character.
A maid appears, played by Lola Gaos, who we are told was a sinister former lover of Ana's father, and the characters suddenly begin to drop phrases from Strindberg's Ghost Sonata in home conversations. Now Strindberg's somnambulant drama seems to serve as a reflection of Ana's family.
The dialogues are increasingly absurd and pompous. The book that seems to hold the key to Ana's survival disappears. And since the cinema of the time had to be daring and show adult content, these films abound in deliriously scandalous situations: here, of course, Ana has been repressing her sexual desire for many years, and in a scene that is hilariously absurd and disgusting at the same time, the guy and the maid decide to return her sexual desire.
In other disastrous scenes, Ana suffers persecution and mistreatment by the military apparatus and officials of the dictatorship, who are also searching for the book and the key.
The most interesting moments take place during Miguel Narros' performance of Strindberg.
Sleepwalkers was filmed after the death of the dictator in a difficult time of searching for a social pact, a transition to a stable democracy, resignations and concessions everywhere. Clearly there are intellectuals who did not agree.
The director, however, was more virulent and less cryptic in his attacks on the extreme right in his previous film Black Lime.
