I've seen this film twice now and I can't work out what the significance of Irene's dream at the end is. I'm assuming it has a deeper significance. I am always embarrassingly slow when it comes to understanding plots of films but this one has really puzzled me. All I can think of is that Ana finally acknowledges the death of her parents but I'm sure there's more. Can anyone please shed some light for me?
Irene's dream is a nightmare in which she is kidnapped. She wakes up just before they shoot her in the head. So the dream is about death. The whole movie is about death, specifically the deaths of the girls' parents and Ana's odd reaction to the deaths in which she blames herself. I don't think there is any other significance to the dream.
share
Neil is right about the theme of death, but I will go into more detail.
Basically, you can see it as both a national allegory (what will happen to Spain once Franco inevitably dies) and a personal dream with a gender message (women and their lack of freedom in Catholic Spain).
If it is a national allegory about the "hijacked" future of Spain (kidnap and hijack are the same verb in Spanish—secuestrar), then her dream seems uncannily prophetic in retrospect because it alludes to a terrorist pursuit, and soon terrorism, in the form of ETA, would dominate much of the Spanish consciousness as the uneasy road to democracy became littered with the victims of Basque separatists.
The kidnapping in the dream shows that the girls look ahead to an uncertain future, in which they may not have the control they would like to have over their destinies. They are portrayed as being sandwiched in between the faded dreams of women of the past (the grandmother), the deceit of women of the present (the aunt) and the unrealistic images from the media (the models they cut out of magazines). So where are the models they might follow in order to shape their own destinies?
In the morning the girls are expected to march off to Catholic school in their proper uniforms. For the leftist Spanish director, this means that they cannot escape the legacy of Catholicism and the norms imposed on women by this religion (no divorce, no birth control, etc.). As they walk to school, their uniforms and the baroque style of their school building are supposed to form a contrast with the modern urban landscape of Madrid that surrounds them. So they are being educated for a world that no longer exists—this is the meaning of the kidnapping that the director most certainly had in mind, though it may not seem obvious to viewers outside of Spain.
So it's in fact an unhappy ending?
Your argument is persuasive, Bklyn4ever, and certainly shows a broader knowledge of the contexts Spanish culture and history play in the film. I didn't catch the feminist allegories you point out, but again your arguments persuade.
However, the mere fact that the movie ends with a seeming escape from the insular world of the dead parents' home to school -- a place seemingly filled only with other children, a place dedicated to the future -- seems a kind of escape, even if, as you point out, it's an exchange of prisons and constrictions.
I'm curious -- how allegorical would you say the film is? For example, is the other couple (the woman whom the father cheats with, the man with whom the aunt briefly dallies) representative of something? Or the housekeeper? Or, for that matter, Ana's murderous impulses?
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I should warn you -- he's a Fourierist.
You could certainly call the ending pessimistic or at least skeptical. These young ladies represent the future of Spain, and you see them being herded into an atmosphere of joyless conformity and anachronistic "glory."
Spanish culture by the end of the Franco period (1975) had gotten so allegorical you need to decode almost everything, in films and plays especially, since censorship was strongest in the more visual and popular art forms.
The other couple, both marital cheaters, represents the corrupt morals of the ruling classes, the ones who would support Franco and his rhetoric of Spanish moral superiority ostentatiously but then do whatever they feel like without regard for others. The aunt is a part of this social segement; she's very concerned about maintaining the family's "honor," to the point where she wants no discussion of the past, and hence the girls will not learn from their mother's mistakes.
The housekeeper represents the working classes, full of vitality and folk wisdom but exploited at every turn by the upper classes (she allows the head of the household to play around with her, the typical señorito-and-his-maid liaison is at least hinted at).
Ana herself with her somewhat twisted notions of loyalty and revenge is like a miniature Nora from Ibsen's "A Doll's House." Part of her wants to fire that gun or use that poison in order to erase the injustices of the world. She has an excuse, as a child/irrational being, for having these destructive inclinations, but the movie condemns more harshly the hypocrisy of practically all the adults in her life now that her mother is gone (the only truly "good" adult other than the paralyzed grandmother, she fell victim to the others).
Well that's how I've worked it out with the help of some books on the subject (by Virginia Higginbotham and Marvin D'Lugo; you might find those interesting too).
I completely believe you! Though for some reason part of me rebels against your reasoning, particularly because I don't share the sense of pessimism, bleakness or scepticism from the closing scenes. I don't see the school as "joyless conformity and anachronistic 'glory'," for one, but primarily because I don't see the school (or the uniforms) at all -- the focus for me is on the girl's finally leaving the house.
Part of my impression of the ending too is that the pop song "Porque te vas" is finally being played -- it has a very triumphant feel to me, at least, and I believe it's the first time the song's played without being interrupted by an adult (I might be wrong on this score). Ana adopts it as her anthem. What's the meaning of the song?
I do like the allegorical aspects of the movie, especially since they strike me as exceptionally subtle. Did the Spanish public (wasn't "Cria Cuervos" a box-office smash in 1976?) read these symbols as well, and react to them? It strikes me that taking the movie as a political allegory would be somewhat depressing, since -- as you point out -- the tendency towards fascism, both upper-case and lower-case, is reified. Can't Ana's tendencies towards murder be seen as proto-revolutionary? What happens to those?
And lastly: how do the aunt and the mother's ghost work allegorically?
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I should warn you -- he's a Fourierist.
CRIA works as a family drama as well as a political allegory, so its appeal was not limited to people looking for the latter kind of meanings. Everyone loved the child actress Ana Torrent and she could have pulled them into the theaters on her own (she had already starred in two other films). As you probably know, child actors and actresses can be immensely popular in Spain (Marisol, the kid in MARCELINO, etc.).
But the song you mention, "Porque te vas," has its place in the national symbolism. The lyrics are about abandonment. It is the typical song that says, what will I do once you're gone, you'll forget me but I'll never forget you, I'm as helpless as a child without you, etc. Well, all of that could be applied to the Spanish problem of what next after Franco is dead. He was seriously ailing at the time and, like the situation now in Cuba, nobody was certain what would happen when he took his leave of this earth. Now people can look back and say things turned out "mainly OK," but at the time there was much uncertainty. It was already a popular song sung by a foreign singer Jeanette, and its replaying in the movie adds to the import each time you hear it again. Definitely by the last reprise you can see it refers to the whole nation, as the camera draws way back and you see a large slice of Madrid.
So the song and the way it is used in CRIA CUERVOS is similar to "As Time Goes By" in CASABLANCA. This was also a pre-existing hit song that was replayed in the course of the film and acquired meanings beyond the personal/sentimental.
Yes, I can see Ana as a proto-revolutionary as well. That is also why she is like Nora in Ibsen's "A Doll's House."
bklyn4ever, your astute analysis of this film's symbolism left me speechless.. huge congrats and thanks for sharing in such glorious detail.. :-)
shareLuciaJoyce,
I've just re-seen Cria for the first time in what seems like decades although I think I've seen it in the interim since seeing it originally in the late 70s. It's not always that a film that bowled me over SO long ago still hits home and moves and feels as "fresh" today as it did then - it has not aged with time into anything 'dated' imo.
I'm choosing your post to enter the dialogue with because I like how you probed Brklyn4's pov, appreciated her (?) responses, but also share your nagging sense of insufficiency or incompleteness with those assessments because I too see more hopefulness in the coming-of-age process we have witnessed through Ana's wise-beyond-her-years eyes.
One supporting factor, as-yet-unmentioned (in this thread), would be the role played by Geraldine Chaplin as Ana 20 years later looking back on her childhood, expressing her struggle to understand herself and her impulses to kill her father, even her belief still as an adult that indeed she had killed her father - yet was not wracked by guilt over that - and yet we the viewers (SPOILER ALERT) know that Ana did not in fact kill her father. Even when we first hear of the magic can that Ana's mother had given her to throw away, we can hear that her mother could have been teasing her or being playful with Ana's sense of fantasy and power by overstating its powers. Yet that is for us to witness and it adds poignancy to think the adult Ana still doesn't seem to know that what she as a child had invested with such power was a can of apparently expired baking soda.
What magic she invests with power is to me the thread that can lead to seeing the film as empowering - not through the child-like super-powers Ana presumes that magic can gives her - to choose the when and how of death for her immediate family members - be it from revenge or from compassion (Ana as a very early film protagonist in the name of assisted suicide). Jose Luis Borges has a famous line this recalls - roughly translates in English as: "I don't know myself. I don't even know the hour and means of my death." Ana's preoccupation with death (not surprising given how much of it she has experienced) can be seen as her own route to self-understanding and to the kind of personal power that implicitly yields an Ana 20 years later who seems self-reflective in a very self-caring, quietly empowered way that suggests Ana did not in fact succumb to the "system" that sought to indoctrinate her.
Ana had the memory of her mother's deathbed words resonating in her: "It's all a lie. ... They lied to me... There's nothing ..." Those imho were her mother's indictment of her Catholic upbringing suggesting that death would bring peace and salvation and visions of heaven, whereas she was feeling no such relief or release and had no desire for such a heaven, only wanted to live. That maternal message clearly stayed with Ana and would have given her a kind of resilience in the face of the indoctrination the system (including her Aunt as emissary of that voice - as well as the various military males inhabiting Ana's young life).
I hear Porque te Vas -- which was the single most salient memory of my first viewing of the film over 30 years ago -- the scene where the 3 girls dance to it once the aunt has left (That was the first time they listened to it all the way through, then again at the end it plays through in 'voiceover') -- anyway, that song is one i hear Ana actually treasure because ironically the words of that song keep her mother alive in her consciousness and memory - as she identifies with and memorizes lyrics that tell her her experience is not unique but one that a song has given her words with which to name her feelings of longing and abandonment. The song itself nurtures her (and as such is a salve for abandonment). Having that song close out the film in voiceover and with camera also in "overview" panning back over the school leaves me with a feeling more akin to Ana affirming a "we shall overcome" resilience that had been her gift all along, bucking convention and mandates to voice her own individual spirit. The Ana 20 years later seems to me to confirm that young Ana mellowed into a mature independent thinker who keeps questioning and not accepting the status quo. That to me is a hopeful final message.
Carolyn
p.s. I just remembered this thread had started out being about the dream ... I responded entirely to other comments in above replies but might add a thought about the dream as well while i'm at it :-) ... What I heard in Irene's dream that she recounts to a rapt Ana at breakfast, with Rosa overhearing, is that Irene too is "free" from the constraints of the adult authority world, the one where their Aunt would have silenced any such talk. The telling of the dream, with all its sense of impending violence, can be seen as symbolic of an uncensored childhood where kids can actually voice what comes to them in nightmares or in visions and not be silenced or punished for doing so. To me, in the spirit I described above, it also adds to feeling a positive take on the film's end - these sisters are growing up to find their own voices and communicate their anxieties, which in itself (I say this as a therapist) is a key to healthy self-definition. Neither Irene nor Ana is shamed or secretive about their inner lives but increasingly able to speak their truths (noteworthy for Irene who was fairly conformist at the beginning).