Vacas

"T'is the old wound sire" laments Lancelot before mysteriously expiring at the end of John Boorman's Excalibur.

A post-mortem on Julio Medem's Vacas (Cows) would also point to a clear case of old wound pathology. The Francoist firing squad is a bit of an old castaño in Spanish cinema and this unfortunately is where this intense and cyclical pastoral saga winds up.

To some extent though Vacas (1992) is itself about old wounds, the old wound of lost Basque autonomy and specifically here, a gash in the intwined destinies of two rural Guipozcoan families, the Irigibels and the Mendiluzes as they pan out between 1875 and 1935.

Vacas was Medem's debut and won him a Goya. All of his films address us in a dense, sometimes opaque symbolic idiom. This worked well for me in Lucía y el sexo but here the visual imagery is more like viscous morass that bogs down the film's protagonists.

Several actors and one cow are recycled across three generations of action, which may catch out the inattentive.

It's still worth a recommendation. Even when his meanings are at their least transparent, the poeticism of Medem's moviemaking is a delight in itself. Not since Picnic at Hanging Rock has the natural world throbbed with such sinister menace.