Blood Wedding (1981)

How sad is this?

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A company of Flamenco dancers rehearsal a play of Federico Garcia Lorca about a wedding imposed by the parents to the bride. She is indeed in love of another man, and when the groom finds her with her lover, they duel with razors, ending tragically the feast."Bodas de Sangre" is an original movie, where a play is danced in a room. I personally like this folkloric Spanish gypsy style of music and dancing, therefore I liked this film. However, I agree that for those viewers not used to this type of dancing and music, this art movie probably is boring. The group of dancers is excellent, and gives a wonderful choreography and interpretation. This film is the beginning of Carlos Saura's dance trilogy, completed with "Carmen" (1983) and "El Amor Brujo" (1986). My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Bodas de Sangue" ("Blood Wedding Feast")

The play on which this film is based is Federico García - Lorca's classic, poetic drama. The playwright/poet/actor/artist, who was probably Salvador Dalí's lover, was a brilliant sensualist who understood the power of myth and rural life. In this movie the story that is being performed on stage, the story that is taking place off stage, the whole weight of Spanish history and culture, the weight of flamenco as ballet and as folk art, and modern myths of romantic love are layered over and over each other. The movie is inexorable -- even when you realize the outcome, you are drawn hypnotized into it. Perhaps the greatest dance film ever made! You MUST see it.

I had found Saura's last film, TANGO, trite and insulting, but I decided to give him another chance, in deference to his reputation. I needn't have bothered. Whatever his talent as a chronicler of character under oppression, he has no ability to film dance. He has no faith in dance's own expressive tropes, so he must impose meaning on them. He films in a flat, leaden style, which never allows the dance to come to life.Like TANGO, Saura foregrounds a self-reflexivity on the film. This time, however, it is used relatively intelligently. There is a pretence of documentary as we watch 'famed' choreographer Antonio Gades prepare for his flamenco adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding. We see the preparations of the dancers, the (tedious) warm ups, the donning of costumes.None of this is gratuitous (although the lingering on the undressing female dancers might be), and is infinitely preferable to the fictional ponderings of TANGO. The opening credits roll over a sepia photograph of the cast, mimicking the period in which the play was set. Lorca was, of course, a famous leftist, murdered by Fascists in the Civil War, and this is a film, made only a few years after Franco's death, that attempts to come to terms with Spanish history. The lengthy process of rehearsal emphasises the process of becoming, suggesting that history is not the monolithic entity the Right would like it to be, but a fluid interpretive searching, grasping, for the truth. The repeated gazing into mirrors links this national quest with an examination of the self. And yet Old Spain is not so quickly vanquished - one dancer hangs religious pictures on her mirror.So, the dance is made to carry a lot of baggage. We are not given the actual performance, but a dress rehearsal, continuing the idea of becoming, as if to offer a fixed definitive version would be to concede to the enemy. This austere restriction to one bare space, without sets, without any help from Saura, means that the dancing has to be spectacular for the film to succeed. It is not, being rather conservative, and blindingly obvious and literal, the dance equivalent of dialogue sung in a Lloyd-Webber musical. Every gesture is laboriously spelt out; the viewer is credited with no intelligence.It is totally inadequate to the play's politics, and the pared down approach means we lose its febrile, exhilirating excess. The critique of machismo and the death wish, applied to Spanish culture as a whole, is still there, but the climactic stand-off, while comparitively inventive, is more silly than cathartic, like Cavalliera Rusticana with the sound down. It is odd that a film so critical of the macho ethic should be so...macho.As with TANGO, any effect the film has lies in the music, which, especially in the mariachi wedding sequence, provides the drama and beauty absent from the filming itself.

The human body uses the dance language to tell the simple story of damned love. The ballet, far from being a tool incidental to communication, carries within itself a whole body of assumptions about love and death, about sin and punishment.The story line is simple. A bride elopes with her lover in the very day of her wedding. The groom follows the two lovers, and a knife fight takes place. The rivals stab each other and the only wedding that takes place is that one knotting their destinies together in death. A blood wedding.Besides from the unearthly beauty of the dance spilling out of the dancers bodies on the Flamenco rhythm, the film goes a long way toward shaping and determining the kind of thoughts one is able to have on the controversial topic of sinful love.