SOLO GOYA!
by Don Larsson

In Goya's greatest scenes
we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
'suffering humanity'
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets
cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final
hollering monsters of the
'imagination of disaster'

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Spanish guitar and castanets. A screen drenched in blood-red. The guts and severed head of a bull. The bull's carcass dragged and hung in a grotesque parody of crucifixion. The carcass becomes a face.

The face is of the old and exiled Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Francisco Rabal), once court painter to the royal family of Spain, transformed despite himself into one of art's great visionaries, now a man who has lived too long and seen too much. The old man's scarred and battered, bull-like face, surmounted by a halo of thin white hair, testifies to suffering and longing. As the old painter works on his last drawings, "The Bulls of Bordeaux," sparring with his wife and daughters over his medical care, he slips in and out of dreams, memories and fantasies of his life, his loves and the horrors he has seen.

The young Goya (Jose Coronado) was an ambitious social climber, lover of the Duchess of Alba, the subject of his infamous "Clothed Maja / Naked Maja" (which showed her dressed or nude depending on the angle of the light). Her formal portrait shows her pointing to the ground below her feet, where she testifies to the love affair written in the dirt, "Solo Goya" ("Only Goya.") But Goya was also a believer in liberalism and progress. His portraits of his patrons, the King and Queen of Spain, are scathing indictments of stupidity, cruelty, and vanity. It is a miracle that he ever got away with them. Napoleon and the ideals of the French Revolution seemed to promise relief, but when Goya saw the atrocities brought by the French troops, he had to record the reality of what his hope had come to. Ferlinghetti's poem is all too accurate a description.

Carlos Saura, himself the Grand Old Man of Spanish film, is used to portraying art and passion. GOYA IN BORDEAUX has some of the same artificiality and theatricality that marked his dance trilogy, Blood Wedding, Carmen and El Amor Brujo. But the artifice is all at the service of the emotion, both of the painter's life and of his subjects. In a story that seems like a fevered dream, the film shows why Goya, nearly 200 years gone, is the most contemporary of artists.

CineScene, 2000