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From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Belle Époque
Dir: Fernando Trueba
Belle Époque is the story of Fernando, a young army deserter, who finds shelter in the country estate of a liberal artist ‘somewhere in Spain’ early in 1931. The artist’s four daughters arrive from Madrid seeking refuge from the ‘turmoil’ of strikes and demonstrations, and Fernando falls in love with them one after another.
The early 1930s was probably the most crucial period in Spanish history and the struggles then in embryonic form culminated in the Spanish Civil War. After seeing off a military dictatorship the working class, through revolutionary strikes, disposed of the monarchy and forced the ruling class to introduce a republic.
The film begins at this vital crossroads in Spanish history when Fernando is arrested by two Civil Guards as he makes his way across Spain following the failed Republican coup of 1930.
A pattern of incidental comment on Spanish political history is repeated throughout the film and many important references pass unnoticed, except to the historian.
Indeed the entire revolutionary period is treated as one great farce – the sacristan who burns down the church (because, we are told, he wants a pay rise) replaces the much more serious hostility to the feudal Catholic Church from both peasants and workers.
Yet Belle Époque portrays the important advances made by the working class in the period – laws permitting divorce and abortion, giving women the vote, curtailing church interference in education – not as the result of struggles taking place in society at large, but of bohemian attitudes.
Despite the humour and the occasionally sharp criticism of state institutions, particularly the church, the overriding impression is of confusion and disorder in an outside world which is never actually glimpsed.
While the film parodies the simplistic attitude of Juanito, the Carlist school teacher, to free love, the supposedly liberated attitudes of the daughters are no more enlightened. At root, all view marriage and economic security under a husband as the ultimate goal. The artist, a great ‘liberal’, is unable to accept the fact that one of his daughters is a lesbian and goes into paroxysms of delight when he discovers she has had sex with Fernando.
The plot soon reveals itself as being little more than the conventional boy meets girl(s) love story.
Belle Époque is a beautifully made film with skilful camera work and excellent acting. In the end, however, the past is seen through a prism of the present. The concern to downplay the political events and to treat them as either farce or pathos is more of a comment on the modern Spanish middle class’s disillusion with parliamentary politics than it is a reflection of a period of tremendous revolutionary upheaval.
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