Seldom does a movie title become the label for a historical period. Soon after Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's death in 1975, El Desencanto, captured the ghost of Francoism and froze it in a breathtakingly beautiful celluloid gem. The film, which evolves around the rebelliously aristocratic and humorously decadent family of the deceased Francoist poet Leopoldo Panero, has become a cult phenomenon in Spain.
In 2004, Rockdelux, arguably the most prestigious popular culture magazine in Spain, named El Desencanto the third best Spanish film of all time. In thirty years, a black and white "experimental" documentary on the family of the late Francoist poet Leopoldo Panero, has become a cult movie. When Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who ruled Spain for 40 years, died in 1975, a sense of confusion mixed with vague hope and a perpetual sense of numb longing soon crystallized into a word that became a defining spell: disenchantment, desencanto. Jaime Chavarri's film trapped the common feeling in the motionless amber craft of his celluloid, and gave the phenomenon its name. Beyond metaphors and interpretation, El Desencanto is a haunted lyrical place, the timeless yet ferociously vivid glow of an ineffable twilight. Like a Visconti's script filmed by a disobedient Godard, the film gracefully stirs through a rather uncinematographic affair: the heavy curtains of Schubert's D959 sonata drag the camera's eye to the covered statue of Leopoldo Panero, egregious poet of Francoism. The statue, which will preside the central plaza of the old provincial town of Astorga, is to be inaugurated in the twelfth anniversary of his death. This trivial event constitutes the pretext for a set of conversations and monologues about the father figure by the poet's widow and their three sons. It is the outcome of these exchanges that would eventually be regarded as both a metaphor for the legacy of Francoism and one of its most ferocious attacks. The Paneros' openness and savvy when discussing their father/husband and family, the tensions and allegiances between the brothers and their mother, the irony and the sensitivity in their words were all magnified and, in a way, mythified by their historical context. After 40 years of imposed conformist silence and stale pre-modern dogmas, the conspicuous Paneros' public display of their most hidden family affairs was perceived─with either extreme disgust or euphoric praise─as both an attack on the core of the Regime, the Catholic family, and a metaphor for Francoism and its moral and social consequences. Nevertheless, it is not only its historical significance or its metaphorical qualities that make El Desencanto a unique jewel of Spanish cinema. A sepia still of an iridescent and fragile time, El Desencanto oozes the ghostly timelessness of exceptional art. The movie constitutes a magnificent and genuine account of the end of a kind, a provincial, literary and Spanish version of a Wittelsbach drama imbued with irony, tragedy and a certain degree of grandeur. Under the extreme sobriety of the documentary form, a disappearing world emerges to produce a last shine. The portrait of the dysfunctional, aristocratic family begins with the mother, Felicidad Blanc, Proustian dame of extreme beauty and somewhat cruel serenity, married and widowed to the alcoholic and notorious poet Leopoldo Panero. At this point, the three sons appear in a series of dialogues and monologues elicited by the silent and questioning naked eye of the camera. Juan Luis, the eldest, cosmopolitan, poet, mildly rebellious, dandy, snob, the belated father figure, the uncrowned Oedipus. Michi, the youngest, a handsome and apparently defenseless dilettante, but actually the main mind behind the documentary, a two-sided young man whose lips are as refined as his sting. And finally Leopoldo Maria, the mad genius, delinquent, schizophrenic, successful poet, recluse in prisons and mental asylums, who appears late in the film, and subverts any preconception in monologues and dialogues with his mother that are still controversial today. The complete picture, consisting of silences as well as words, of empty places and dilapidated noble stones, accounts for a monument that froze something that is no more, a drop of amber that encapsulates the most vivid account of a possibility of life unknown to the present time. The depiction, though, is not made without irony and humour. Paraphrasing Verlaine, in the Panero's story there is no "empire à la fin de la décadence". Decadence is their sole and magnificent empire. And they seem to be thoroughly aware of it. Time would actually prove them right. Felicidad died alone in 1990. Michi followed her, forsaken and poor in 2004. Juan Luis continues to write poetry despite his chronic illness. And Leopoldo Maria has lived his entire life in mental asylums and has become the poete maudit of Spanish letters. The covered statue of the dead father that appears at the opening and closing of the film constitutes the artistic representation of absence. Absence made visible art would fittingly describe El Desencanto.