El Sur: A Triumph In Chiaroscuro

'The South' is a 1983 film by Victor Erice - the director of the spellbinding Spirit of the Beehive. Both films deal with aspects of Spanish history and in particular the consequences of the civil war. El Sur is set in the very north of Spain in a deliberately damp and cold landscape, the family around whom the story is spun living in a house on the edge of town joined to the rest of the area by a long, straight road which is referred to as the border.

The father used to live in the South, in Sevilla, but left for reasons that are shown to be both personal and political. The effect of the fracture in the family, in politics, and in the his way of life is reflected in the way that characters are frequently lit half in the light and half in shadow. The expertise with which this contrasted light and shadow is used throughout the film is little short of astonishing.

This contrast can be seen as reflecting both the sun and light of Andalucia and the dreary winter in Galicia (or similar); of the period before and after the civil war but most profoundly in what it conveys about the essential unknowability of the other. Even the doting daughter comes to realise that her father has many secrets which revolve around his former life in the South.

Throughout there is a feeling of inhabiting liminal space and peering into obscurity. Scenes emerge only gradually into light, frequently lit from one side in a deliberately painterly style and even then as likely to fade away into nothingness as to become clear.

The obscurity of what has happened is mirrored in the quasi magical powers of dowsing and hypnotism with which the father is suggested to be endowed. In one sequence at the daughter's first communion, he appears from the shadows at the back of the church to which he then returns having promised not to 'go away'.

The daughter of the family acts as the centre of gravity seeking to understand her father as her mother retreats further and further away. In one sequence she hides under the bed and refuses to be found thinking that if she retreats into silence like the others it will shake them into behaving differently. Instead, the father appears more and more of a revenant; someone who is in many senses dislocated. His refusal to go back to the South but the increasingly clear emotional bonds that it holds for him ultimately conflicting to tragic effect.

The music heightens this sense of dislocation. The wondrous piano music of Granados is a modernist take on traditional Spanish forms; Ravel in minor key melancholy mode adds a sense of muted but simultaneously profound interiority.

As a film it is simply magical; a work of subtle genius that conveys huge amounts through small inflections. At the very end the daughter does indeed leave on a visit - it is clear that she is coming back - for the South. The visit, it is suggested, will aid her return to health. More profoundly, it will perhaps start to mend the wider fractures that have been evident throughout.