ANOTHER BARDEM’S NEGLECTED MASTERPIECE

DVD Review

by Harvey Perr

published April 25, 2008

Death of a Cyclist

released by The Criterion Collection

running time 87 minutes

Now that Javier Bardem has found his place in the history of international cinema, it is about time that his uncle, the extraordinary Spanish director, Juan Antonio Bardem, regains the reputation he won so quickly in 1955 and lost so precipitously, at least as far as American audiences are concerned, just a few years later. As might have been expected, it is The Criterion Collection who has taken up the cause with its release of  Death of a Cyclist, the film that won Bardem his startling rise to fame and changed forever the Spanish film style.

When the rarely seen film showed up at the Janus 50^th anniversary retrospective, the print was in pretty ragged shape, and so it is particularly thrilling to see that Criterion has brought us another of its pristine restorations that captures with such sharp imagery the immaculate black and white and, in particular, the velvety grey tones of the film as originally conceived by Bardem and which went on to win the International Critics Prize at Cannes in 1955. The prize may have been given at the time less for its formal cinematic achievement than for its content – so its reappearance proves doubly revelatory – when its sly critique of Franco’s stifling regime came as a total surprise to European audiences.

Bardem was, vocally at least, heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism, but also by the Hollywood studio system, and, although committed to the idea of reality, the look and feel of his film has less to do with the neo-realism we now associate with the films of Rossellini and DeSica and early Visconti than it does with the early work of Antonioni. There is less the grittiness and graininess we expected of realism and more the carefully lit and intricately edited and beautifully composed images we recognized from a more sophisticated and more conventional style of film-making. It is ironic that Bardem’s film helped dismantle Spain’s studio system, a system that would have appeared to be more congenial to Bardem’s visual style. Such was the impact of the content made by his film. It was almost as if his subject matter, rather than his directorial inclinations, was the real source of his immediate success.

It is an intriguing story, to say the least. Two lovers, in an attempt to cover up the discovery of their relationship, also cover up the killing of a cyclist, an accidental murder they have committed. The woman, played by the extravagantly beautiful Lucia Bose (who, incidentally, also starred in Antonioni’s Chronicle of a Love Affair and A Lady Without Camellias), is married to a high official; her lover is a college professor (the superb Alberto Closas).  As the film navigates through the world of a rotting ruling class where hypocrisy is standard behavior, it simultaneously looks at the burgeoning dissatisfaction of its protesting students, through an incident involving the male lover, who eventually sees what he has become morally, and who, subsequently, seeks redemption. The film is awash in cynicism, and yet attempts to reach out for some kind of hope.

Today, the film’s visual style dominates its political schematics, evidence that, in film, an artist is finally measured more by the way he looks through a camera than the way he thinks of the world; the latter will always reflect the former. And so it is a shame that the

accompanying documentary, Calle Bardem, is a talking heads piece which shies away from the imagery in his films and concentrates on how he was perceived by his contemporaries. It is hoped that Calle Major, the film which Bardem made after Death of a Cyclist, will be rediscovered; the final images of that film are the among the most indelible in this reviewer’s memory.

This edition does include Bardem’s call to arms for Spanish cinema, which is valuable, but which again pleads a case for his politics rather than for his politique du cinema, which Death of A Cyclist reveals to be infinitely more essential.

harveyperr @ stageandcinema.com