There’s a Spanish proverb:
Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos—which translates to:
Raise a raven’s chick with love, and yet you’ll find that when it grows up, it will still peck out your very eyes.
You are a good person.
You help others,
harm no one. What does this mean?
That you’ll never face trouble? Something like that? No,
that’s wrong. You’re the one who will face trouble. First of all. And the person who will play the biggest role in bringing you trouble will be the very one you helped. Want to hear something more interesting? When harming you, they’ll use the very wisdom whose opposite you gave them—
so they would never fall into danger. Parents care for their children with such devotion,
raise them with such love. And when that same child tries to harm their parents?
Even if they actually murder them or attempt to? The first two words of the proverb that opens this piece give us a film: Cría Cuervos, made by Spanish director Carlos Saura
in 1976. By the way,
the English translation of the film’s title is:
Raise Ravens.
Ana, age eight. Impassive and tranquil by nature. Waking up in the middle of the night, she went to her father’s room. Father was telling some woman about his passionate love for her. A little later, his lover rushed out of the room,
disheveled and half-naked. To avoid scandal, she practically fled the scene. Ana went into her father’s room and found
him dead. Her eyes and expression remained unmoved, normal. She took the empty glass from beside the bed,
went to the kitchen and washed it away. Sex and Death!
Sex, all right. But why Death?
Ana’s father worked in the army. The woman who had emerged from the room the night before was the wife of one of his colleagues. She too has come with her husband to pay final respects to the deceased. Other colleagues are there as well. At their aunt Paulina’s insistence, Ana’s two sisters kissed their dead father’s forehead. It’s a social custom. Ana didn’t. She absolutely refused to be persuaded to kiss him. She went and stood behind her grandmother instead. What was Ana’s problem with kissing her dead father’s forehead?
Ana is far more mature than her age suggests. She understands much of what’s happening around her,
why it’s happening.
But she says nothing. She watches in silence. Her gaze is cold, detached. Her mother had shown her a vial and told her it contained the most terrible poison in the world. She has kept that vial with herself. Very carefully. She’s the middle of three sisters. The eldest is Irene, the youngest Maite. She often encounters her mother—when Ana opens the fridge to get cabbage for her pet rabbit, and later when she buries the rabbit with great care after its death,
even then her mother comes and says,
it’s so late, why aren’t you asleep yet?
Though mother died long ago. Ana believes her father poisoned and killed her mother. It’s also possible that
through neglect and indifference, her mother died after long suffering from illness and mental anguish. Then how do these encounters happen?
After her father’s death, when Ana went to the kitchen to wash the glass, her mother had come. Ana had mixed poison into her father’s glass. Did father die from that poison?
If so,
then when their aunt Paulina was kissing an army officer on the sofa,
why did Ana, suddenly entering the room with a pistol in hand, receive a slap from her aunt for witnessing this illicit romance, and then even after mixing the same poison into aunt’s glass of milk, how did aunt survive?
Was what Ana believed to be poison actually poison at all? Then was that married woman somehow involved in father’s death?
Or did father really die of a heart attack? Mother came even while Ana was combing her hair before the funeral. Why doesn’t mother come all the time? Is mother really dead?
Does Ana see her mother because her subconscious mind imagines her? Then is everything that’s happening really happening only within Ana’s mind?
Ana grows up. She looks into the camera and tells the story of her past life. Ana’s mother did so much for the family. Before marriage, mother played piano beautifully,
had she continued practicing, she might have become a famous pianist,
yet she gave up everything for her daughters and devoted herself to domestic life. In return, what did Ana’s father give her mother besides suffering?
Ana looks exactly like her mother. Like her mother, her life too is full of sorrow. She seems to have inherited all her mother’s sorrows. From her father she received a pistol. One can kill people with it. She received nothing else in life.
Ana and her two sisters live at their aunt’s house. Their childhood passes there. Solitude and melancholy are their constant companions. Yet there’s some joy there too. The three sisters have great fun together,
they take cosmetics from their aunt’s dressing table and apply them as they please, wear wigs. Irene plays father,
Ana plays mother, Maite plays their daughter. In their games, father is involved in adultery. Mother suspects this. They have heated arguments. The daughter silently listens to her parents’ quarrels. This is what they’ve grown up watching from childhood. They play hide-and-seek. Whoever gets caught has to pretend to die. That’s the game. The three of them dance together to a very popular song of that time. When told to leave bed and go to school in the morning, the two sisters crawl under the covers for fun. Ana spends a lot of time with their grandmother. Grandmother can’t walk,
can’t speak,
sits all day in a wheelchair looking at some collaged family pictures stuck on a board,
listening to songs and laughing as she remembers old memories. Ana conducts some experiments with grandmother. She tries to understand an old woman’s psychology. They have much joy. But that joy is surrounded by melancholy. What melancholy?
In the film, Ana never smiles. Her eyes are fixed,
her face expressionless. A kind of suppressed rage always shrouds her. She seems strangely slow-moving. She could commit murder with perfect composure. There’s mystery in her character, depth in her personality. Penetrating that mystery and depth is nearly impossible!
She stares with an unblinking gaze, her eyes never giving anything away. Looking at her, no one could tell
whether she’s planning a murder at that moment,
or thinking of her beloved doll. She speaks somewhat easily with only one person. Her name is Rosa. She works in that house. When their aunt leaves in the morning,
Rosa looks after them. Rosa is warm,
wonderful. Ana’s childhood isn’t like other girls’ childhoods. She’s had to grow up witnessing many ugly aspects of life. She had no hand in that. No form of compassion, affection,
or tenderness works within her. She has seen their mother suffer infinite mental anguish because of father’s dissolute lifestyle. Ana’s father felt no remorse for his wife’s suffering.
In the final scene, the three sisters are going to school together. They’ve left the house and come out onto the street. Passing the billboard advertisement, they walk toward school. New year,
new school,
new dreams. Forgetting all pain and death, they’re starting life anew. “It’s all lies! There’s nothing beautiful in my life. Nothing at all! They’ve lied to me.”—Ana’s soliloquy, in a way that of all three sisters. They’re walking away from the world of lies toward the world of truth. Why is the film called ‘Cría Cuervos’?
Ana lives within an unknown world of her own,
at some signal from that world she wants to kill her father,
the mysterious ‘vial of poison’ given by her mother seems to have granted her the power to fulfill all her terrible desires,
with that ‘poison’ she wants to kill even the aunt who cares for them, who loves her so much. Such cruelty shouldn’t enter an innocent child’s mind,
yet in the film it
does. The terrible diseased childhood has left them shrouded in a corrupt nostalgia,
and thinking about the final scene,
it seems they want to escape from there.