Peppermint Frappé (1967, Carlos Saura) (Patreon)

55/100

Saura started directing movies before I was born—this one, for example, predates my existence by about six months—but because he turned his attention to dance right around the time that I got into foreign films, ca. the '80s and '90s, I still think of him primarily as the guy who made Carmen and Flamenco and Tango (plus other dance-heavy pictures, like El amor brujo, that I'm aware of but haven't yet seen). So it's pretty exciting to discover that at least some of his early work is very much in the '60s tradition of enigmatic European art cinema, expressly indebted to Buñuel while riffing on various other chilly modernists. Plus Hitchcock, of course—there's no way to talk about Peppermint Frappé without citing Vertigo, as the plot more or less amounts to "What if Madeleine and Judy had actually been two different women, and the former hadn't (apparently) died but just wasn't into Scottie at all, enjoyed tormenting him?" What Saura and his two cowriters do with that scenario didn't entirely satisfy me, possibly because it functions on the level of national allegory (not a bad thing per se, but virtually always uninteresting to me, even when the nation in question is my own); as much as I enjoyed José Luis López Vázquez' quietly neurotic performance, and was knocked out by Geraldine Chaplin's ability to make her whole facial structure seem different when she's Ana than when she's Elena (though she's hampered in both roles by poor dubbing), their characters' actions rarely make psychological sense, and Saura doesn't compensate with overt formal abstraction (which is how Buñuel made it work). All the same, there's queasy fascination aplenty here, and even aspects I ultimately don't love, like Julián's murder plot, allow for sublime moments, e.g. Julián dancing to psychedelic rock exclusively from the waist down while he waits and waits for the poison to take effect. 

Here's my fundamental issue: Ana becoming complicit in Julián's crime and offering herself up for radical transformation (with none of the resistance Judy puts up) demands something more compelling than just "she's a lovelorn doormat." And Chaplin, at least in later years (she was only 23 here), was certainly more than capable of embodying a woman whose motivations are at once unknowable and intriguing. This film doesn't give her the opportunity. It takes Julián seriously, but treats everyone else as merely representational. Which is really just a pompous-sounding way of saying that I don't believe these "people" would behave as they frequently do, except in response to the screenplay's dictates. Again, that's not necessarily "wrong"—certainly it's equally true of, say Dogville, one of my favorite films made this century. But Dogville, however much it may ostensibly be "about America," illustrates universally ugly human tendencies that I recognize (specifically w/r/t how we treat those who are most vulnerable and helpless, and the mental contortions required), whereas Peppermint Frappé seems to me largely opaque. Perhaps Julián's need to kill Elena and turn Ana into Elena, and Ana's eagerness to go along with that insanity, would pack a hefty thematic punch were I more knowledgeable (or let's just say "knowledgeable") about Franco-era Spain. Instead, I'm struggling to interpret it as psychology, and that ain't happenin'. (Should also note that I'm at a loss re: why Julián's obsession originates with a third identical woman; that she's from Calanda, like Buñuel, is not helpful.) If the patron who requested Frappé's goal was simply to spark my curiosity about early Saura, however: mission decisively accomplished.