A Cambios en el sistema de información contable convencional

Familia is a film that centres around what, at first, seems to be the epitome of an average upper middle-class family on the day of the man of house’s fifty-fifth birthday. However, the initial familiar bustle and arguments of the opening credit sequence and first scene at the birthday breakfast table is shattered when patriarch Santiago (Juan Luis Galiardo), upset that his youngest son Nico (Aníbal Carbonero) has given him a pipe when he does not smoke, sets about lambasting the boy. After calling him an idiot and complaining that he did not want a fat child with glasses, he tells Nico that he is fired and storms out. Through the dialogue of those who remain, it soon becomes apparent that what, just moments before, had semmed thoroughly convincing family is in fact a theatre troupe hired to act as Santiago’s family for the

185 _{See also lines 427-428 and 949-954. 1655 refers to the year El gran teatro del mundo was first}

published, Allen and Ynduráin (1997) give 1649 as the year it was probably first performed (1997: xxiii).

day. After this initial setback, Nico manages to win Santiago round and the

performance of family life carries on as if nothing had happened, as it so often does after domestic disputes. Santiago’s ‘wife’ Carmen (Amparo Muñoz), ‘mother’ Rosa (Raquel Rodrigo), older ‘son’ Carlos (Juan Querol), and ‘daughter’ Luna (Elena Anaya) are soon joined by his ‘brother’ Ventura (Chete Lera) and ‘sister-in-law’ Sole (Ágata Lys), who come to take part in the day’s festivities. They eat together, sleep siesta and while away a lazy afternoon, which is only interrupted by the arrival of Alicia (Béatrice Camurat), a ‘stranger’ who is left stranded just outside the house when her car gets a flat tyre. After admiring Santiago’s family, she accepts an invitation to stay for his birthday barbecue. However, she gets a shock when after a pleasant conversation with Santiago he suddenly declares his love for her and says they should tell Carmen. She flees to the bathroom only to find Ventura and Carmen having sex in the kitchen. Despite the confusion Alicia remains with the family and is still there late in the evening when Rosa is found dead in the garden. As ‘the family’ sit around her body, laid out on the dining room table, Alicia feels compelled to confess to them that she is an actress, only to find out in her turn that this family is also just an act.

Made in 1996 Familia was León de Aranoa’s directorial debut, which was largely made possible through the support he received from veteran producer Elías Querejeta. Perhaps best known for his work with dissident director Carlos Saura during the late sixties and seventies, Querejeta had been impressed by León de Aranoa’s short Sirenas (1994). Picking up on this connection with Saura, Heredero has suggested that one can discern in Familia “los ecos del cine metafórico más representativo de la transición política (una especie cultivada mayoritariamente por la factoría Querejeta), del que rescata no sólo la doble lectura que encierra, sino también

la presencia de los fantasmas familiares, tan habituales en aquella formulación”.186 These aspects of the obliquely critical and highly metaphorical auteur cinema associated with Saura and other dissident directors certainly do seem to resonate in

Familia. However, while in Saura’s work families tend to act as a metaphor for the wider social context and political situation, in León de Aranoa’s film the critical focus remains firmly on The Traditional Family itself.

Familia was released in January 1997, a year when box office takings from Spanish cinema were dominated by commercially successful genre films like the comedies Airbag (Bajo Ulloa, 1997) and El amor perjudica seriamente la salud

(Manuel Gómez Pereira), and the thrillers Carne trémula (Almodóvar, 1997), Tesis

(Amenábar, 1996) and Abre los ojos (Amenábar, 1997), but were also boosted by the family-centred psychological dramas La buena estrella (Ricardo Franco, 1997) and

Martín (Hache) (Aristarain, 1997).187 In this context, Familia was a moderate critical and popular success, despite, or perhaps because of its blurring of different modes of representation, use of little-known actors and more modest production values.188 Like Bollaín’s debut two years earlier with Hola, ¿estás sola? (1995) and Zambrano’s two years later with Solas (1999), León de Aranoa’s Familia was lauded for its freshness. The director’s follow-up feature Barrio (1998) was the first of the group of Spanish films that prompted a revival of the term cine social.However, the manner in which

Familia dissects the roles, narratives and values associated with The Traditional Family constitutes a critical engagement with social structures that, as discussed in the

186 _{Heredero (1999: 223).}

187 _{These films all featured in amongst the top ten Spanish film earners in 1997. The viewing and box}

office figures recorded by the MCU ranged from 2,195,715 spectators and 7,205,891.99 euros for the top grossing film Airbag, and 576,269 spectators and 2,084,174.20 euros for Martín (Hache) in tenth place.

188 _{The figures given for Familia on the MCU database estimate that the film attracted 151,333}

introduction to this thesis, lies at the heart of cine social. The theme of unravelling the lie of the family, or the family built on lies is also the plot motor of several other films being produced around this time, for example, such as the dramas Adosados (Camus, 1996), La vida de nadie (Eduard Cortés, 2002) and En la ciudad sin límites (2002). However, the crucial difference between these films and Familia is not just that the latter constantly shifts between the dramatic and the comic, but also that it overtly places The (Traditional) Family, rather than a family, at the centre of its narrative.

Alfred Hitchcock famously remarked that cinema is “life with the boring bits cut out”.189 But in Familia it is precisely these “boring bits” that León de Aranoa recuperates for cinema. On the one hand, León de Aranoa teases out and analyses the dramatic and comical elements of everyday routines and the rituals of family life. The film’s non-diegetic music, the playful jazz of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane

Grappelli, is often juxtaposed with disconcerting situations, showing how closely the comical and the potentially troubling coexist in the everyday. On the other hand, he deconstructs this comedia of the mundane by rendering its continuous (re)production and (re)presentation visible, thereby revealing the intrinsically performative quality of a social institution that is usually deemed to be entirely natural.

Through metadrama the film exploits the boundaries between reality and fiction as a means of stressing the humour and horror inherent in the daily lives and underlying power dynamics of The Traditional Family. Jonathan Thacker and

Melveena McKendrick’s observations on role-play and metatheatre in the comedias of Golden Age playwrights would seem to demonstrate that this preoccupation has a

189 _{Maltby (2003: 429), quoting Hitchcock.}

long history in Spain and beyond.190 According to McKendrick, the comedia is

“fascinated, in both serious and light-hearted plays, by the relationship between reality and pretence or illusion and therefore with role-play, assumed identities and plays within plays”.191 Meanwhile, Thacker argues that metatheatre can be used to reveal the constructed nature of social life, by exploring the effects of characters’ “self- dramatization”. He also claims that “the conventions of drama are related to the conventions of social life” because “real” society is “theatrical”.192

Familia breaks the illusion near the beginning, and yet the role-playing is upheld almost to the end. Indeed, viewers may find themselves forgetting that the family on screen has already been revealed as a fiction, even though reminders continually punctuate the film. The self-conscious performance of family roles and the unfolding of believable, mundane family dramas develop side by side. The viewer’s complicity in the characters’ self-conscious performance draws us into the narrative while simultaneously encouraging us to reflect on familial identity. As Heredero suggests, Familia plays with the idea of “la familia como teatro y como representación […] como mentira y como verdad; en definitiva, como aparece y funciona entre todos nosotros; es decir, como realidad que hay que soportar y como ficción necesaria, o quizás al revés”.193 As this chapter demonstrates, Familia is an incisive illustration both of the power of The Traditional Family to convince and of the effectiveness of metadrama in undermining the automatised nature of this conviction.

190 _{The relationship between theatre and life, as explored through various configurations of the}

theatrum mundi topos, stretches through Western cultures back to classical Greece, see Christian

(1987: vii-xix).

191 _{McKendrick (2000: 76).} 192 _{Thacker (2002: 18).} 193 _{Heredero (1999: 222).}