Directed by José Luis Cuerda; written (in Spanish, with English subtitles)
by Rafael Azcona, based on the short story collection "Qué Me Quieres,
Amor?" by Manuel Rivas; director of photography, Javier Salmones;
edited by Nacho Ruiz Capillas; music by Alejandro Amenábar;
produced by Sogetel, Las Produciones del Escorpión and Grupo Voz;
released by Miramax Films. Running time: 96 minutes. This film
is rated R.
CHICAGO SUN TIMES FILM REVIEW
BY ROGER EBERT
Butterfly" takes place during that brief moment in Spain between the formation of the Republic and the Civil War. A history lesson will be necessary for most viewers, and the movie provides it, explaining that the old order of church, military and monarchy was overthrown by a new leftist government, legally elected, which was then challenged by the right.
The war that followed was like a rehearsal for World War II, with Hitler testing his Luftwaffe and Russia supplying the communist side. The story was more complicated, because the Russians also fought for control of the left against the democratic socialists and the anarchists; George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia tells the whole story from the point of view of an observer who was left-wing but anti-communist.
The point is that freedom flickered before being crushed by big players on the world stage, who ushered in Franco and decades of dictatorship. People dared to admit their real religious beliefs (or lack of them), and to prefer democracy to the king.
And as "Butterfly" begins, a 7-year-old boy is preparing for his first day of school in a village in Galicia. His name is Moncho (Manuel Lozano), and he is frightened, because his older brother sometimes comes home after being beaten. In class, when the teacher calls him to the front of the room, Moncho pees his pants and flees. But then the teacher comes calling. He is a kindly old man named Don Gregorio (Fernando Fernan Gomez), who explains he would never beat anyone. He coaxes the boy back into class, and gently introduces him to the to the world and its wonders. He gives him two presents in particular: Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, and a butterfly net. Together, the old man and the boy study nature.
The boy's father is a tailor. Moncho's home life is happy, and enlivened by his older brother's enthusiastic interest in the opposite sex. There are, however, scandalous secrets in the village, which lend an ironic twist to one of the subplots. But in general, life is good--until the fascist uprising changes their lives forever.
"Butterfly" is based on the short stories of Manuel Rivas, and indeed ends like a short story, with a single word that colors everything that went before. Because the film marches so inexorably toward its conclusion, it would be unfair to hint at what happens, except to say that it provides a heartbreaking insight into the way that fear creates cowards.
Fernando Fernan Gomez, who plays the teacher, had the title role in "The Grandfather," a 1998 Spanish film that got an Oscar nomination and won Gomez the Goya Award as Spain's best actor of the year. I found it a little too sentimental; "Butterfly," while not lacking in sentiment, excuses it by being seen through the eyes of a naive child, and dilutes it with nostalgia and regret. The film's ending poses a hard question for the viewer: Would we behave more bravely than the characters on the screen do? We are fortunate to live in easy times.
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
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NEW YORK TIMES FILM REVIEW
A Landscape of Wide-Eyed Wonder as a Political Storm Gathers Overhead
By A. O. SCOTT
It sometimes seems as if the film industries of a peaceful, prosperous, and more or less united Europe have staked their survival on recreating the strife, misery and division of the European past. In recent years, the political catastrophes that convulsed the continent in the middle decades of the 20th century have become fodder for costume drama, as horror gives way to sentimentality.
Recent films like Istvan Szabo's "Sunshine" and Regis Wargnier's "East-West" confront the brutality and moral ugliness of fascism and Stalinism, but they infuse the past with an unmistakable air of romance.
This development is troubling but inevitable. For all our commitment to remembering, the past does recede. Its specific hurts become less acute, and its ephemera -- silk stockings and veiled hats, boxy automobiles and charming rural towns -- become objects of nostalgia.
"Butterfly," José Luis Cuerda's delicate, quietly devastating new film, is doubly nostalgic since it filters its tale of ideological cataclysm through the eyes of a child. But Mr. Cuerda, who fashioned "Butterfly" out of several linked short stories by Manuel Rivas, views childhood realistically, as a state of curiosity and confusion, rather than of preternatural wisdom or angelic innocence, and so "Butterfly," though it has the look of a picture postcard from the olden days, arrives with the urgency of a telegram.
Moncho is a sensitive, observant boy living in a Galician town in the summer of 1936, when Republican Spain was on the threshold of civil war. This was a time when ordinary Spaniards, according to the film's introductory titles, were torn between the desire for social progress and the demands of tradition. In Moncho's family, this tension takes the shape of occasional disputes between his father, a tailor with Republican sympathies, and his churchgoing mother, who is, as her husband affectionately puts it, "very mystical." The town itself is less amicably divided, and here are portents -- black-hatted Civil Guards lurking in the woods, testy exchanges between the local schoolmaster and the parish priest -- of the strife to come. Of course, the main upheavals in the boy's life are not political at all, but are rather the usual jolts and wilderments of the coming-of-age story.
Manuel Lozano, who plays Moncho, has a wide-eyed, slightly pouty face that registers amazement, bafflement and an almost scholarly intellectual appetite. Moncho is equally fascinated by the physiology of bugs and the mechanics of human sex (which he observes while spying, with his best friend, Roque, on the town drunk sporting in a hay loft with the town tramp).
"Butterfly" is a bit like a calmer, less bawdy "Amarcord" -- full of the magical absurdity of recollected boyhood, set to the brassy tumult of a ragged provincial dance band. But Moncho's story, inevitably, involves a loss of innocence, which the stealthy arrival of fascism renders particularly devastating.
After his doting parents and his dreamy, saxophone-playing older brother, Moncho's most important relationship is with Don Gregorio, a freethinking schoolmaster whose unorthodox ideas about pedagogy and discipline (to say nothing of religion and politics) make him a suspect, as well as a revered, figure in the town. As Don Gregorio, the great Spanish actor Fernando Fernán Gomez, recently seen in a small role in Pedro Almodóvar's "All About My Mother," embodies the faltering, lightly comic dignity of the doomed republic. His every word and gesture signal his faith in democracy, progress and the innate perfectibility of human nature. This makes him a tragic figure, and gives the film's nostalgia a core of raw political anguish. Don Gregorio, with his passion for science and stubborn (and frequently tested) belief in the decency of the boys he teaches, personifies the flawed, valiant attempt at modern secular democracy that was driven underground and all but extinguished by Franco.
If "Butterfly" makes you feel that loss anew, it also looks at it from a consoling distance, so that the betrayal of democracy becomes an enactment of personal, intimate, childish weakness rather than an inexplicable evil.
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Miradas desde el sur: crítica.
La lengua de las mariposas remite a Antonio Machado: el maestro de escuela de ideas republicanas, en el sopor de la provincia. En efecto, Fernando Fernán Gómez, el maestro de la película cita al poeta en una referencia un poco irónica. Sin embargo, el provincialismo proverbial de España no se supera en la película (no es una película de tesis). La provincia es el escenario de varias vidas, ante todo la de Moncho, el niño que ahora descubre sus primeras letras y los primeros milagros (la lengua de las mariposas) junto a su maestro.
Aunque reiterada como escenario
dramático, las vísperas de la guerra civil española ayudan a visualizar ciertas
implicaciones íntimas: en el orbe familiar, las creencias, la conformación
social, la renuncia o la renuencia frente un credo político prohibido. Lo valioso
de La lengua de las mariposas es que su realizador José Luis Cuerda, ha optado
por la visión "paradisíaca" de un niño, y su contrapropuesta en la mirada
madura, desencantada, pero leal y humanista de un maestro muy viejo. Articulada
en cuadros dramáticos entrelazados, o yuxtapuestos, la película avanza entre un
costumbrismo encantador que es a la vez el inicio de la formación de un niño.
No se trata sin embargo de una mirada "inocente", porque la tensión
de los acontecimientos políticos circunda
opresivamente el encanto. En efecto, La lengua de las mariposas concurre a un
final sostenidamente dramático, pero muy coherente.
La discusión de la enseñanza, la creencia política y religiosa, el peso del conservadurismo del ambiente, y la fragmentación de las relaciones (ilustradas por ejemplo en el descubrimiento un poco perturbador del sexo), habla de un estado de cosas que se precipita a un conflicto. Un conflicto que como todos sabemos llevó a la tragedia cuando se volvió inmanejable. La escolaridad que se inicia, el ansia de aunar el conocimiento y la poesía (piénsese en Machado, en la explicación que ofrece el maestro sobre la lengua de las mariposas) se encuentran en el peor de los ambientes, y no hallan el más encantador de los cauces. La trágica brecha que se abre entre Moncho y su maestro, es además dramática, lógica. La guerra exige las más absurdas definiciones, y los odios no sólo apremian sino que se cimientan desde la autoridad (aun en la mente de un niño). Una pregunta queda a manera de reflexión conclusiva de la película. Cómo se recobrará la inocencia, y cómo se hará el diálogo posible luego de esta separación. Por otra parte, algo de la respuesta se ve en la dignidad del maestro, que al contrario del padre de Moncho, ha optado por asumir su identidad política, aún cuando esta implica la muerte.