BLANCANIEVES

Young Carmen is our Snow White, daughter of once-renowned matador Antonio Villalta, crippled in the ring and grieving for his wife, who died during childbirth. We are given a swift and fiery account of Carmen’s upbringing by her flamenco dancer grandmother, her torment at the hands of her tyrannical stepmother and her secret schooling in the art of bullfighting by her father, just before his malicious new wife enacts a terrible revenge on him. Knowing that she’s in mortal danger, Carmen joins a travelling troupe of bullfighting dwarves, eventually rising to fame in the corrida under the stage name Blancanieves.

If The Artist is a love letter to the heyday of Hollywood silent cinema, then Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves is an homage to the sumptuous European silent melodrama. Relocating the Grimm fairy tale to a romantic vision of 1920s Spain and working in atmospheric black and white, Berger takes full advantage of the silent film’s expressive potential to depict the golden age of toreros with gory, Goyaesque violence.

Diana Sanchez, TIFF