Flak Magazine: Review of Butterfly, 09-15-00

There are essentially two faces of today's Spanish cinema. One is represented by Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre), last year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, and the other by director and screenwriter Jose Luís Cuerda's Butterfly (La lengua de las mariposas, literally, Butterfly Tongues). The type of movie represented by Almodóvar's most recent effort is a tale of heady, urban, modern-day Spain: still reeling from the '80s post-dictatorship party scene, and proud to admit that Spain's society is an amiable blend of drag queens, pregnant nuns, teenage punks and traditional families.

Butterfly, on the other hand, is a movie that harks back to Spain's recent history. Spain suffered through and escaped the noose of dictatorship only in the last half-century, and Spaniards do not easily forget the events that brought them to modern democracy, able once again to enjoy the liberties represented by Almodóvar's hedonistic playground.

Set during Spain's brief but fruitful Second Republic — between 1931 and 1936 — Butterfly aims to present a personal view of Spain's last chance at a democracy before the Spanish Civil War exploded in 1936. Butterfly is, however, not pigeonholed as a historical film; in its details, cinematography and acting, it is a work of superior filmmaking, which Spain has been seeing more and more of in the past few years.

As is the trend in Spanish cinema these days (see Secrets of the Heart or Lovers of the Arctic Circle), Butterfly is a story told through the eyes of a child. Moncho, the young son of the local tailor (a supporter of the Republic), is frightened at his first exposure to school, and curious about the details of sex, nature and growing up. Don Gregorio, played by a pillar of Spanish cinema, Fernando Fernán Gómez (who was last seen briefly in All About My Mother and starred in The Grandfather, Spain's entry for the 1998 Academy Awards), is the town's schoolteacher: wise, patient, and it becomes apparent, also a dedicated Republican.

Moncho becomes increasingly attached to his teacher, who subtly exhibits the qualities that make him a well-regarded Republican: He never hits his students, he patiently waits for them to be ready to learn, and he cares more about their interest in the natural beauty of Galicia than in their knowledge of standard texts in the classroom. The Republicans in the movie are generous people, obviously the sympathetic focus of the film, while the town's conservative side — the priest who scowlingly speaks only in Latin, the upper-class gentleman who bribes Don Gregorio with fowl to make his son learn better, among others — are aptly portrayed as threats to the Republican way of life.

It is in a setting of gaiety and lush, green scenery that Butterfly is rudely interrupted by the invasion of the military, and eventually friends must turn against each one another to save themselves from being labeled "red," "atheist" and "traitor" and methodically carted off by the military.

José Luís Cuerda, in making Butterfly, has avoided one of the dangers of delving into the story of the Spanish Second Republic — the desire to tell too much. There are details left out here; the movie's action does not revolve around politics. Instead, the film is wonderfully shot and cast to reveal the daily existence of a boy in a small Spanish town of the 1930s. However, Cuerda's combination of everyday life and this turning point in Spanish history is genius: Butterfly's final images of Don Gregorio and Moncho, both victims of the cruel invasion of the Spanish Civil War, is a picture of filmmaking at its finest.

— Sara J. Brenneis (sara at flakmag dot com)