Are faux silent movies the new (old school) animation? Calculated or lucky, Pablo Berger’s “Blancanieves” arrives on the crest of a genre resurgence, conflating the most resilient of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm (and turned into a cartoon feature by Walt Disney) with an Oscar winning stunt. Anachronism lives: It’s “Snow White” meets “The Artist” in old Seville.
Spanish born and NYU educated, the 50-year-old Spanish director transposes the story of the quintessential fairytale heroine to early 20th-century southern Spain. The eponymous heroine, known mainly as Carmen, is the daughter of famous flamenco dancer who dies in childbirth and a celebrated matador who, momentarily distracted and consequently disabled in the ring, provides the story with its necessary evil stepmother by marrying his scheming nurse. In a further Hispanicizing touch, the Seven Dwarfs are los enanitos toreros, appearing late in the movie as an itinerant troupe of six short-statured bullfighters who might have stepped from a Velazquez painting or a Buñuel film. (Angela Molina, the title character in Buñuel’s “That Obscure Object of Desire,” appears as Carmen’s benign grandmother.)
An international prize winner and one of the hits of last September’s Toronto Film Festival, “Blancanieves” is rich with atmosphere. Berger’s production design is detailed and impeccable — as is his mise-en-scène. Filmed in glamorous black and white, all dialogue furnished via intertitles (but lots of lush flamenco music supplied by sometime stand-up comedian Alfonso de Vilallonga), the movie is less a pastiche than “The Artist” and, at least initially, it’s not as precious. The expressionist lighting, gothic architecture, and textured look are self-consciously European although it’s striking that Maribel Verdú (best known here for her role in “Y tu mama también”), slinking and vamping through the role of the Stepmother like Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard”, and Antonio Villalta, in the role of Carmen’s beloved wheelchair-bound Father, strongly resemble the two ersatz Hollywood stars of “The Artist,” Bérénice Bejo and Jean Dujardin.
Shot with a panoply of overhead angles and close-ups, and an occasional rapid fire montage, the movie is visually lively and ingenious and even affecting, up to a point. The first half, when the heroine is a persecuted child (charmingly played by Sofia Oria), is considerably more intense than her eventual triumph in the arena, recognized as her father’s heir at last. Although Berger eschews certain details from “Snow White”’s Spanish version in which the evil queen demands not her stepdaughter’s heart on a plate, as in the Grimm version, but a bottle of the girl’s blood stoppered by her toe, the movie has a measure of fairytale cruelty — not least when the Stepmother kills a beloved pet (not the cute doggie that trotted through “The Artist”) and serves it up for dinner — although the sequence does have echoes of Robert Aldrich’s 1962 silent film star shocker, “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”
Still, Berger’s exercise in old-fashioned cinematic attractions is basically affirmative and perhaps even didactic in making the point that where female self-actualization is real, Blancanieves being a far more dynamic character than Disney’s Snow White, Prince Charming only exists in fairytales.