Los Niños de la Guerra I - La Lengua de la Mariposa
Illustration by Rebecca Nolten
Join columnist Asher Porter as he examines a new film in each article in this three-part series, ‘Los Niños de la Guerra’, which explores the role of children in Spanish cinema about the Civil War through both a historical lens and from a simple love of film.
The first instalment of this three-part column looks at José Luis Cuerda’s film La Lengua de las Mariposas, which explores the restless period before the start of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of the young protagonist, Moncho. A tenderly woven tapestry of images of rural idyll and childhood nostalgia, the film crescendos into a heartfelt coming of age story, following the rambling journey of the protagonist as a firm friendship grows between him and his teacher, Don Gregorio. The heart of the film, however, lies in its final scene, and the eruption of the Civil War, arresting Moncho’s childhood overnight and ripping his innocence from him, as he is forced to denounce Don Gregorio as a traitor in order to save himself from the persecution of the emerging fascist regime.
Throughout the film, Cuerda establishes a wonderfully lethargic pace, with ambling long shots of the Galician countryside providing a perfect backdrop to the touching storyline of Moncho’s first few days at school. In fact, it’s a shared love of this wildlife through which the bond between the young boy and his teacher grows, with Don Gregorio taking Moncho under his wing and teaching him about birds, insects, and flowers, even taking the boy on outings to catch the titular butterflies. In many ways, Don Gregorio also takes us by the hand, teaching us about the ‘espirotrompa’, or butterfly’s tongue, and walking alongside us as we watch Moncho grow older – we acutely feel his paternal joy at seeing Moncho dance with Aurora at the local verbena, and are equally inspired by his zeal for education, thus Cuerda manages to achieve a delicate dichotomy of at once viewing the world through the eyes of young Moncho, and also relating to his mentor. Perhaps Cuerda, in choosing a child protagonist, does so deliberately to establish this feeling of innocence throughout the film, which makes the betrayal of the Civil War all the more bitter; it’s as if the war has stripped us of our childhood, and thus Cuerda magisterially paints a human portrait of life before the Civil War, and then the paradise lost upon its outbreak.
Interspersed throughout the agrarian scenes of fields and glades, however, the distant yet ever nearing footfall of the Civil War can be heard in the film; tense scenes of men huddled around a radio at the local bar, the appearance of Falangist soldiers at a celebration of the Republic - the childhood idyll feels constantly under threat. Perhaps, again, one of the reasons why Cuerda’s masterpiece is so poignant is due to this looming shadow of the war over such a realistic performance from the young Manuel Lozano, who was nominated for the Goya for the Best Child Actor for this role, which combine to add an almost unsettling feeling of realism to the work. The film truly feels like a tranche de vie, and forces us to reflect on the ways in which this colourful and peaceful way of life becomes a relic of the past for the generations shackled under the dictatorship of ‘el caudillo’, and indeed throughout the final scene, the echo of Don Gregorio’s teachings of the importance of ‘Libertad’ in education seems like a hopeless ideal, a luxury afforded to those who don’t have to choose between their beliefs and their life, adding a further undertone of bitterness as the audience realises that Spanish children will not have that kind of freedom for the next half a century.
Cuerda manages to broach more than just the loss of education in his work, taking the time to explore the loss of community felt in Spain after the Civil War, with the final shots of bruised and despondent prisoners seeming so dissonant to the previous ones of fellowship and festivals. Indeed, this ideological rift cut so deeply into the Spanish psyche that its effects can still be seen in Spanish politics today, for instance with the ongoing friction between the Partido Popular and left-wing politicians as to whether they should exhume the mass graves of the war, or respect the ‘pact of forgetting’ established at the end of the dictatorship. Cuerda develops this theme by then focussing at a micro level on the brutal effect that the ideological rift in a family can have – Moncho’s father, a staunch Republican, is reduced to tears in the final scene as his wife tells him to yell ‘criminales’ at the procession of political prisoners, yet the director manages to strike an emotional balance between both characters: we both emphasize with the father, choosing his duties to his family over his ideology and his friends, and the mother, who assumes leadership of the family in its darkest hour, guiding them through the turbulence of the time with the sole goal of its preservation. Thus, Cuerda manages to transform a coming-of-age story of a young boy into an emotive and profound portrait of the before and after of the Spanish Civil War, showing us the loss of community, of education, and of family that this seismic event caused, and reminding us that so much more than lives are lost during war.