Word: saura
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Born. To Geraldine Chaplin, 30, Sir Charles Chaplin's cinemactress daughter (Doctor Zhivago, The Three Musketeers), and her lover of eight years, Spanish Film Director Carlos Saura, 43: their first child, a son; in Madrid. Name: Shane...
Geraldine Chaplin was sitting on top of the world. Charlie's oldest daughter, 28, was in Madrid with her lover, Director Carlos Saura. She was also playing Anne of Austria in a zany new version of The Three Musketeers directed by Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night). Meanwhile four other versions of the Dumas novel were being filmed, two in Italy and two in France, making this the summer of the 15 Musketeers...
...SAURA defines his politics by opposition, and Antonio's resistance to his own recovery is the kind of interior revulsion against capitalism that Saura wants most of all to present. Perhaps the best example of this comes toward the end of the film when Antonio has recovered sufficiently to walk and mumble vague desires. He asks to be taken out in a boat. His wife, thinking it a moment of nostalgia for their honeymoon, joyfully rows him out from shore. But once on the lake, Antonio begins rocking the boat spasmodically, pathetically slapping at his wife with an oar, muttering...
What sustains the film is the aptness of individual scenes such as this one, where Saura touches the bitterly comic within the pathetic. But capitalist consciousness as a subject can fascinate for only so long. And there are moments when Saura seems to be groping for one more element to satirize, one more fantasy to present...
Finally, he is unsure how to end his film and lets it drift off in surrealism. Though his contempt for capitalism is apparent, Saura is unwilling to commit himself to a concrete alternative. He scores point after political point, but he stops his argument short of its finish. The film is a proof without a conclusion. And the problem is not in Saura's treatment but implicit in the subject itself. Capitalism is a system that yet awaits its formal conclusion, and while Saura marks time until the fall, he can only offer a pessimism cloaked in satire...