La prima Angélica
| La prima Angélica | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Carlos Saura |
| Produced by | Elías Querejeta |
| Written by | Carlos Saura Rafael Azcona |
| Starring |
José Luis López Vázquez Fernando Delgado Lina Canalejas |
| Cinematography | Luis Cuadrado |
| Edited by | Pablo González del Amo |
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Release date
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Running time
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107 minutes |
| Country | Spain |
| Language | Spanish |
Cousin Angelica (Spanish: La prima Angélica ) is a 1974 Spanish drama film directed by Carlos Saura. Starring José Luis López Vázquez as a middle-aged man whose memories of his childhood during the Spanish Civil War make him reenact his past as the mature man he is today. The film was entered into the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and was highly controversial in Spain.
Luis, an unmarried, middle-aged, Barcelona businessman, carries out his mother’s dying wish to be buried in the family crypt in Segovia. He has her bones exhumed from a pantheon in Barcelona and heads by car to the Castilian city. In the middle of a lonely road, he stops and gets out of the car, recalling the same landscape at a moment in his childhood when he was being brought up to spend part of his summer vacation with his maternal grandmother in Segovia during the fateful summer of 1936. He sees his parents before him, trying to soothe him after a bout of carsickness. Just days before they were to pick him up, a military uprising cut Segovia off from the Republican part of Spain and Luis found himself trapped in the menacing environment of his mother’s Nationalist relatives for the duration of the war.
After this first remembrance of his carsickness, Luis continues his journey. Arriving in Segovia, he makes contact with his aunt Pilar and his cousin Angélica, his sweetheart during his Segovian captivity. Angélica is now married to Anselmo, a successful businessman, and has a daughter of her own, also named Angélica, who is just about the age her mother was when she and Luis were sweethearts. The reunion rekindles old memories for Luis.
In these remembrances, the past is not merely evoked, but reenacted with Luis literally entering a time warp. Characters Luis has met in the present appear to him playing the role of relatives he remembers thirty-six years earlier. The child Angélica of 1973, plays the role of her own mother, Luis’s cousin Angelica, as he thinks he remembers her from 1936; Anselmo is imagined as Angélica’s fascist father. When Luis recalls scenes from his childhood, he walks into them as the middle-aged man he is.
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Wikipedia