SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL: Black Bread, a big prize winner at the Goya awards in 2010, has one of the best opening sequences of any film I’ve seen this year.
The setting is a forest. It’s daytime but the stark spiky trees cast a dark pall. A boy and a man make their way uneasily through this rough terrain in horse and carriage. A hooded figure emerges out of the trees and kills the man with an enormous rock, while the little boy watches, hidden in the canopy of the wagon, too scared to make a sound. A beat later the killer will take the dead man, the boy, the horse and carriage and send the lot over a cliff.
This episode has the feel of a nightmare, and not only because of the mysterious figure of the hooded killer. There’s a sense that the film is out to portray a world gone wrong: a world of brutality, victims and violence.
Based on the novel by Emili Teixidor, Black Bread is ambitious, dense and gripping. Set in 1944 in the countryside around Barcelona, the narrative takes place in a Spain that has only recently come out of a civil war, with the Fascists victors. For the politically suspect it’s a time to be running scared; a time for bitterness and maybe retribution.
Adapted and directed by Agusti Villaronga, Black Bread is part Gothic political allegory and part tragic tale of a boy who by the film’s moving and sad climax has arrived at the end of his childhood.
The movie’s hero is Andreu (Francesc Colomer), an 11-year-old who idolises his leftist father Farriol (Roger Casamajor), who quickly falls under the suspicion of the fascist town Mayor (Sergi lopez) for the murders seen in the film’s opening. As Farriol flees to hide out in France, Florencia (Nora Navas) Andreu’s mother sends him away to live with his Grandmother (Elisa Crehuet).
In his new home Andreu is awakened to sex and politics and the lies that adults must tell so they can learn to live themselves and their past. Andreu’s new pals include Nuria (Marina Comas), a sexually precocious wild young teen, who had a hand blown off by a grenade; and an older Boy (Lazaro Mur) who is dying of consumption and pretends to be a bird.
Black Bread is very much in the tradition of Gothic fiction; it’s a mystery story alright, but the murders that set the action in motion are part of a much larger, darker narrative that stretches way back in time. Andreu’s personal story is intertwined with not only his own family secrets but also that of his village, and its sinister past of persecution and political compromise.
Black Bread is full of fine moments; but Villaronga never quite tops his stunning set-piece opening. Still, it sets a mood and a tone of unease that never abates.
