The great thing about attending a large international film festival like HKIFF is the element of discovery. There is always plenty of variety on offer, much of which even someone like myself – who tries his best to keep track of the year’s buzz titles – knows very little about. Blancanieves was just such a film. I knew it was silent, in black & white and “rather good”, but that was about it. My Spanish is not my greatest linguistic talent, but good enough to know that the name also kinda looked something like Snow + White. I wasn’t going to put any money on it until I saw the acknowledgment to the Brothers Grimm in the opening credits, at which point I settled in, for what I hoped would be an interesting, Mediterranean take on the familiar fairy tale. However that was not what I got.
The film begins by painting a picture of an acclaimed bullfighter, who suffers a crippling accident and is promptly widowed when his wife dies in childbirth. A scheming, money-grubbing nurse (Y Tu Mama Tambien’s Maribel Verdu) seduces him, while his young daughter is sent away. Years pass and young Carmen returns to her evil stepmother’s estate – and finally the film begins to resemble the Snow White we all know and love. Eventually we do see Carmen come of age, become “the fairest”, and be driven away by her murderous new parent. She falls in with a gang of diminutive toreadors, a poisoned apple makes an appearance and everything leads to a final confrontation – in the bull ring no less – with the evil stepmother. What at first seemed troubling and alien ultimately becomes beguiling and reassuringly familiar.
My biggest problem with the film was its aesthetic. While I loved the gothic tone of the piece – venturing into Guillermo del Toro territory on more than one occasion – I don’t think it worked as a silent film. It was as if director Pablo Berger felt that shooting in black & white without sound was enough to evoke the silent era, but with its slick editing, high-def image and always-mobile camerawork, it never felt authentic to the era it was trying to emulate. Eventually, Blancanieves did find its feet and builds to a satisfying climax – both narratively and emotionally – but it takes an incredibly long and challenging time getting there, and risks losing many less patient viewers along the way as a result.
