Elisa, My Love

I've mentioned several times in the past how I have a backlog of foreign-language movies on my DVR that I need to watch before they expire. With that in mind, I watched one that I hadn't heard of before its last showing on TCM: Elisa, vida mía, and wrote up a quick post to queue for some time in the future. That time is obviously now.

Geraldine Chaplin, who at the time of making this movie was the partner of its director Carlos Saura, plays Elisa Santamaria, one of two daughters of elderly writer Luis (Fernando Rey). As the movie opens, Elisa's sister Isabel and her husband and kids are driving down from Madrid to see Dad for his birthday, with Elisa already being there and a narration from Elisa's point of view being read out in Luis' voice. Apparently Elisa's marriage isn't a happy one, so when she heard that Dad was sick after having had an operation, she figures it's a good time to get away from her husband Antonio for a while.

At this point in the movie, Dad is looking surprisingly well, able to bike into whatever little village he lives closest to in order to pick up bread for dinner. And it's a relatively happy dinner, with the kids being happy to see their grandfather and the adults talking about old times. Isabel's husband is a lawyer working on an important case, so he has to get back to Madrid, leaving Elisa and Luis alone and giving Elisa a chance to talk about things with her father and maybe get some advice.

I say maybe because things start switching back and forth between the present and the past. There's a scene of Dad taking Elisa to be part of a drama class he's teaching to elementary school girls; another scene where Dad admits to not loving Mom and hoping that she had actually died when some assailant stabbed her; and Elisa talking about finding out that her husband Antonio was having an affair with her best friend back in Madrid, which is why she wanted to get away from Antonio for a while.

And then things get really weird. The same narration that we have at the beginning is re-read, only this time the action is set in Madrid in the apartment that Mom kept once she and Dad split. Antonio shows up in the village and tries to get Elisa to come back to him, only to find out that there's no way this is happening. So Antonio suddenly shows up again and, well, what happens in that scene is something I'm not going to mention. And then we get the opening narration read a third time.

Now, I read one review which argues that the scenes in Elisa, vida mía are actually supposed to represent scenes from the book that Luis is working on, which the possible message as well that time is not linear. Maybe that's the case, although if you ask me the movie starts making less and less sense as it goes along. Then again, I've always argued here that I'm not the biggest fan of art-house stuff, and even more so of the idea of how there's a certain type of movie buff that seems to go gaga over foreign films precisely because they're art-house material. (If that weren't the case, why is the vast majority of what Americans get in the way of foreign films, at least before the last few decades, decidedly not the sort of stuff that was made for the domestic market?) Elisa, vida mía is decidedly that way, and worse, it runs a good half-hour too long at close to 130 minutes.

If I wanted to introduce people to foreign films, Elisa, vida mía is decidedly not the one I'd pick. But as always, watch and judge for yourself.