Sand and Blood is grim and engrossing and, owing to its bullfighting scenes, violent.  It is set in Southern France.  The two main characters seem to live in separate universes.  One is Manuel Vasquez, a fifty-year-old radiologist, married, and the father of two small sons.  Vasquez and his wife, Carmina, share a love of music.  They also share Vasquez’s tormented history, which has included a mental breakdown and a suicide attempt.  When Manuel was one year old, his father, a Loyalist in the Spanish Civil War, was among a crowd of people herded into a bullring in Spain and machine-gunned down by Franco forces.  Since that time, Vasquez has despised the bullfight, the spectacle of which sickens him.  His French-born sons, however, are too young to share the burden of their father’s past.  (At a pivotal moment he has his sons touch the savaged carcass of a bull in the back of a truck and reminds them of their grandfather, Miguel, and of the Vasquez identity they share with him and himself.)  They love the regional sport of the bullfight that, like their father, has come from Spain to France.  The boys idolize the young, handsome, gifted matador Francisco Jimenez.

Francisco, unmarried, lives a marginal existence, providing the means of support for his impoverished family.  Prior to achieving local celebrity in the bullring, Francisco worked in a slaughterhouse; he counsels his teenaged brother, Mario, to pursue an education rather than fall into the same path that has immersed his life in a river of blood.  But Mario is also eager to prove himself and to help out his parents.  A minor injury in the street finds Francisco and Manuel crossing paths.  A friendship of sorts develops, with Francisco’s mere presence unburying the political and familial hauntings that have already, once, threatened Manuel’s sanity, and Manuel’s life of "light" rather than darkness, embodied in his love for classical music, increasing Francisco’s ambivalence about what he does for a living and undermining his ability to perform in the ring, where, for the first time, he experiences fear--a fear of death because Manuel’s (precarious) example has helped him better to see the value of life.

Two characters contest the increasingly intense relationship that forms between the two men who in years are a quarter-century apart.  Carmina is terrified that this friendship with Francisco will drive her husband back to his former desperate state, from which it took every bit of strength she had to nurse him back to health and reasonable stability.  Concurrently, Francisco’s mentor and promoter, bar-owner Emilio, worries that Manuel’s influence is jeopardizing Francisco’s career, for which he has high hopes as compensation for his own failed history in the bullring, and is jeopardizing, besides, Emilio’s hold on the boy.

A number of commentators have focused on what they perceive to be an unconscious--and certainly unmentioned--homoerotic element in the friendship of Francisco and Manuel.  This disclosure of theirs is close to irrelevant, since the degree of participation of such an element is no greater than that in any other same-gender friendship.  (Here, it can scarcely be said to rise even to the level of behavioral affect.)  Ironically, there is far more likely an unconscious homosexual basis for the Emilio-Francisco relationship, for when the boy finally gives up bullfighting Emilio’s peevish behavior resembles that of a spurned lover.

The basis for the Manuel-Francisco relationship is complex. There are their complementary needs: Manuel’s, to wrestle with his family and homeland history, which Francisco’s success in the bullring causes to erupt afresh in his mind, and Francisco’s, to believe there is more to life than the minor celebrity he is currently enjoying.  Manuel needs to transcend a bloody past, while Francisco needs to transcend a bloody present, and each finds in the other’s experience a means to bring a crisis of ambivalence to a head.  Manuel is burdened, in a sense, by European history, and Francisco is burdened by a lack, an ignorance, of such history; as such, Manuel offers the possibility of bringing more fullness to  Francisco’s humanity, and Francisco offers Manuel the possibility of a fresh and innocent perspective with which he can better arm himself against the ghosts he must wrestle.  Moreover, a contributor to their bond is the self-loathing that each feels and is doing his best to avoid facing.  In the case of Francisco, what more commentary on this point is necessary?  His efforts to steer his brother away from the kind of life he, Francisco, leads is proof enough of how profoundly distasteful he finds his own life.  Manuel’s case is more complex.

The free pass that Europe gave Francisco Franco Bahamonde--note the association with Franco that even Francisco’s name provides--has burdened the grown man, who could do nothing for his father as a child, with a retroactive sense of having somehow contributed to his own father’s death.  In this, in a sense sharpened by personal family history, Manuel represents European consciousness and conscience.  Because Franco refrained from pursuing territorial goals beyond Spain’s borders, he and his military dictatorship (until 1947, when a referendum reestablished monarchy but with Franco retaining his role as head-of-state) was the fascism that survived--fascism, as it were, made "respectable," acceptable.  (During the civil war, Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany both in fact supported Franco.)  Here then was the wound in European political consciousness that the outcome of World War II couldn’t heal.  For Manuel, his association with Francisco holds out hope of healing this wound, if only--and this (not anything sexual) is his unconscious desire--he can wean the boy away from a life of violence, which he, Manuel, identifies with Franco’s tyranny, the murder of his father, and (insofar as Europe left Franco untouched) the spiritual death of Europe.  This is the matter with which the whole film reverberates. Indeed, its closing (and most stunning) image, in Andalusia, sums up the film’s profound and deeply moving passion: representing Europe’s haunted present and, more, moral obtuseness, a bull, in long shot, slowly traversing a field.  Accompanying this and completing it is the haunting sound of guitar playing a Spanish (or faux-Spanish) melody.

This film is wonderfully well acted.  Sami Frey caps his career (Band of Outsiders; César et Rosalie) with his beautiful portrayal of Manuel Vasquez.  There is something especially delightful about a good actor fulfilling a role deeper and more demanding than ones in which we are used to seeing him.  I have spent a lifetime enjoying Frey without once, before this, entertaining the possibility that he could give such a great performance. Matching him in brilliance is the eternal (and herself Spanish-born) Maria Casarès as his mother, Dolores, also a doctor.  There is a fleeting moment of especial warmth when Dolores delights in--not merely praises, but delights in--how lovely her daughter-in-law looks.  But what I love most about this performance is the persistent sense that Dolores’s magnificent calm has been wrestled from a lifetime of hardship; indeed, this radiates the possibility that her son, also, will achieve equanimity despite the turbulence we watch him endure.  I would be striking a much higher note of praise than I did with Frey if I said that Casarès (Carné’s Children of Paradise; Cocteau’s Orpheus) also is capping her career--but I say it; I absolutely say it.  And that face; that incomparable face.  Catherine Rouvel--whom we saw lusciously naked in Jean Renoir’s Picnic in the Grass (1959; remember?)--is fine as Carmina, as is André Dussollier in the somewhat unpleasant role of Emilio.  The role of Francisco, of course, made Patrick Catalifo a star; he is very, very good.

There is one point involving Francisco where Labrune’s otherwise excellent script had me rolling my eyes at her surfeit of wish fulfillment: Francisco halting sex in order to tell his girlfriend that what he really wants to do is talk. If this moment "gets by" at all it is due to the comical exaggeration of this utterance of his: "I can’t make love anymore."

I protest that Labrune’s other films haven’t come my way.  It’s no less censorship when the marketplace makes films unavailable to the public than when a state suppresses films.  It is as pernicious and even more
pervasive.

© Dennis Grunes 2003

• Director: Jeanne Labrune
• Script: Jeanne Labrune
• Photo: André Neau
• Music: Nina Corti, Anne-Marie Fijal
• Cast: Sami Frey (Manuel Vasquez), Patrick Catalifo, André Dussollier (Francisco Jimenez), Clémentine Célarié (Marion), María Casares (Dolores), Catherine Rouvel (Carmina), Pierre Forget (Le Père), Camille Grandville (Annie), Stéphane Albouy (Mario)
• Country: France
• Language: French
• Runtime: 101 min
• Aka: Blood and Sand; Sand and Blood

More French Drama



More French Romance