THE EDGE magazine | Film and DVD | La Madre Muerta (Juanma Bajo Ulloa)

La Madre Muerta (The Dead Mother)
Juanma Bajo Ulloa
Spain, 1993, 107 minutes; Tartan Video
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)

To borrow briefly from Elvis Costello, Juanma Bajo Ulloa's award winner could so easily have been called Blood and Chocolate. Both feature prominently in this dark, distinctly manipulative, questionably exploitative, and really rather fine little thriller.

Chocolate, because that is all we ever see pass the lips of Leire (Ana Alvarez). Brown smears absently across her beautiful but blank features. She is a mute, mentally disturbed in young adulthood after the murder of her mother.

Blood, because violence is the code by which vicious thief and killer Ismael (Karra Elejalde) lives. Blood because it was he who robbed and cold-bloodedly gunned down Leire's mother. Blood because he then held the murder weapon to the head of her small daughter.

Working in a bar and living in a sprawling, abandoned house with perpetually frustrated lover Maite (Lio), Ismael espies Leire on the street one day. Terrified she can identify him, he initially designs to kill the girl, but ends up kidnapping her instead, reasoning that they can at least demand a ransom. Gradually infected by both Leire's innocence and sexual radiance, Ismael is torn between paternalism and passion. Now he can no longer kill, and it falls to the put-upon mother of this dysfunctional family to force his hand.

Ulloa would no doubt be among the first to acknowledge the debt he owes Hitchcock. The thirty-year-old's handling of these sombre and disturbing sexual undercurrents is deft, erring just this side of prurient. Alvarez plays Leire as both virgin and temptress, in thrall more to confectionery than natural fears and hormones. Her childish and teasing glances make for queasy viewing. Like the Hitchcock of Vertigo, the Spanish director knows how to seduce and repel in a single frame. The tact and sly humour of Ulloa's screenplay undercuts any potential offence.

Around this beautifully developed device we are prepared to forgive some more calculated manipulation of sense and expectation; again like Hitchcock, Ulloa is there to second-guess his audience. Thus, when a nurse from the mental home tracks Leire down things take a protracted and startling turn. And the last twenty or so minutes, while possibly a little too packed, pile on corkscrewing events in a way that's worthy of the Coens. The end, against the all odds, is even perversely touching.

Javier Aguirresarobe's photography is dark but crisp, and Bingen Mendizabal's score oddly reminiscent by turn of Michael Nyman and Bernard Herrmann. Both those and some sturdy playing add greatly to the film.

As far as (UK-released) Spanish cinema goes, Madre Muerta (The Dead Mother) is closer to Julio Medem's The Red Squirrel (1993) than the bright offence of Almodovar or Bigas Luna. Funny, audacious (the chocolate punchline is a killer) and genuinely thrilling, the alarmingly young Ulloa has fashioned here a small but undeniably elegant gem. •

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