 |
| Director Juan Antonio Bardem |
 |
| Lucia Bosė |
DEATH OF A CYCLIST (Muerte de un ciclista) A- aka: Age of Infidelity Spain Italy (88 mi) 1955 d: Juan Antonio Bardem
After 60 years, Spanish cinema is politically futile, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically valueless, and industrially paralytic. Spanish cinema has turned its back on reality and is totally removed from Spanish realistic traditions as found in paintings and novels. —Juan Antonio Bardem, in Salamanca, Spain, 1955
An interesting relic from the Franco era in Spain that is memorable on several counts, as the writer/director Juan Antonio Bardem is the uncle of modern day actor Javier Bardem (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, No Country for Old Men, Before Night Falls) and the film won the Fipresci prize at Cannes in 1955, a time when the director was actually serving time in prison for political offenses. Public outcry led to his release, but he was arrested several more times in his lifetime. The director was a Communist and ardent anti-Fascist who never left Spain during the Franco regime, so certainly this social realist film may be seen through his politicized eyes examining the complacency of the Spanish bourgeois society under Franco, where fear is a common denominator that keeps people silent and in lockstep, and might be seen as his version of Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962), filtered through the psychologically paranoid lens of Hitchcock, giving it the feel of a horror film. It features beautiful Italian actress Lucia Bosé, the winner of Miss Italy 1947 (which included other contestants Gina Lollobrigida, Silvana Mangano, Eleonora Rossi Drago and Gianna Maria Canale) and star of Michelangelo Antonioni's THE STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR (1950). Her beauty alone is striking and is central to the film as she plays María, a pampered and spoiled socialite who is comfortably married to a rich industrialist Miguel (Otello Toso) whose wealth allows her to live a life of extravagance and luxury while she is secretly having an affair with an unambitious assistant college professor Juan (Alberto Closas), whose influential family arranged for his position. Their wealth gives them the ability to hide their secrets.
In the opening scene, on a flat country road that extends endlessly across an empty landscape, a lone figure on a bicycle is struck by a car driven by Juan and María who quickly decide to scurry away like rats rather than help the man, Muerte de un ciclista (J.A Bardem, 1955) [HD] | FlixOlé YouTube (1:52). The rest of the movie revolves around this single event, where the two choose to conceal their affair rather than save a man’s life, a decision that haunts them when they learn the man died on the side of the road. In one of the strangest possible changes in mood, they immediately find themselves at a swank, upscale party where the mysteriously strange piano player, Rafa (Carlos Casaravilla), claims he saw her with Juan on the road that day and seems to relish the idea of playing a song entitled “Blackmail,” where the interplay between the two of them is choreographed like a song. The subsequent dread at the thought of being exposed and “losing everything,” which plainly means their privileged position in society, starts gnawing away at each of them, but in a different way. Juan visits the working class village where the dead man lived, a striking contrast of Italian realist poverty to the protected palatial estates of the wealthy, and in this manner seems to reconnect to the world around him, perhaps seeing for the first time the role social divisions play in Franco’s society, while María is seeking protection from the man she sees as an extortionist, growing more hysterical at the thought of what she stands to lose, especially from a vile bottom feeder like Rafa, who is a repulsive, Iago-like figure that dwells in a cave-like world of rumors and “dirty little secrets.” Also an art critic, he seems perfectly at home in the dreamlike atheistic dissonance of modern art, where he finds nothing remotely peculiar or understandable in the harsh abstractions or formless expressions, but his blood curdles at the idea of always being treated as an outsider, so using devious, underhanded means to expose the hypocrisy of the rich comes natural to him, as this represents a new breed of Franco citizenry that spies on and exposes the moral ills of society, keeping the public safe from itself.
This all comes to a head in a superb nightclub scene of Flamenco singing, where Rafa, drunk from liquor, seems to be setting the trap whispering in people’s ears, while María grows more frantically suspicious by the second, becoming a feverish montage of close ups shown with a maniacal energy that suggests madness or delirium, 🚩 Recordando a JUAN ANTONIO BARDEM YouTube (5:58). The film benefits greatly from unusual cuts and a modern sound design, not to mention faces accentuated by white light, turning Bosé’s face into a highly fragile porcelain figurine. Bardem elevates the hysteria of fear to unseen heights, turning this into a Hitchcock homage to horror, as everything that follows slowly unravels from its hinges, as Bosé’s María turns into a woman-in-black femme fatale who senses only the darkest ulterior motives. It’s an unusual bit of movie hysteria, all shown in a taut 88 minutes, where the finale was altered due to the concerns of the national censors, where we’ll perhaps never know the original intentions of the director. Shot by Alfredo Fraile, the clarity of the image is superb, where it has been suggested Bardem may have had the only 35mm camera in all of Spain. As it is, it’s a startling social critique using sharp jagged edges shining the light on some of the darkest days in recent Spanish history, using a scathing noirish melodrama to expose how the wealthy will cling to any corrupt or immoral means to hold onto their privileged status in life, where greed and selfishness are their birthright, and supporting Franco allowed their opulent lifestyles to continue unabated.
