The period of the 1960s through the 1970s was a time of great social upheaval around the whole world. Castro declared socialism In Cuba in 1961, Indochina was bogged down with the Vietnam War, and the Cultural Revolution continued in China. A socialist administration was established in Chile by means of a democratic general election. Even in the Western Bloc, there were the May 1968 events in Paris and demonstrations against a military regime in Greece. In addition, an anti-war movement was surging in America and acts of terrorism by the Red Army and extreme leftists occurred one after another in Japan. In Spain, Franco’s dictatorship still continued since the Spanish Civil War. In short, it was a period where problems that weren’t able to be settled after World War II surfaced.
1970. Nine-year old Anna lives in Paris with her Spanish father Fernando, a lawyer, and her mother Marie, the editor of the woman magazine Marie Claire, in a magnificent mansion with a garden, and she commutes to a prestigious Catholic mission school. Anna spends her vacations in Bordeaux and is looked after every day by their maid, who fled from Cuba where Fidel Castro had established a socialist system. One day, her uncle in Spain is executed for opposing Franco’s dictatorship and the aunt who escaped Spain starts living together in Anna’s house, which triggers a change in the father’s behavior. Fernando, feeling in debt for having not done anything so far for his native country of Spain, feels his social conscience awaken and suddenly takes a trip to Chile with Marie. The two then return completely baptized with communism and start to look like hippies, and Anna is not pleased at all with the changes in her surroundings. The Cuban maid says to Anna, “Everything, blame it on Fidel.” The maid is later fired. Fernando resigns as a lawyer and works to establish Allende and a socialist administration in Chile, while the mother decides to start a movement supporting abortion to expand women’s rights. Because of the change in her parents, Anna’s life also takes a 180 degree turn. She no longer takes the classes on religion that she loved, her family moves from their big house to a small apartment, and she has a Vietnamese babysitter that comes to the apartment. Although President Allende is elected as the leader of the socialist administration, it is short-lived and President Allende is assassinated. Watching her deeply grieving father, Anna decides to visit her family’s roots; she finds that her family was high-ranking nobility in Spain, cruelly oppressed anti-royalists, and belonged to a pro-Franco faction under the Franco administration. The movie ends with the scene of Anna commuting to her first day of school after dropping out of Catholic school and deciding to attend public school.
In a word, the impression I got from this movie is “headstrong.” Headstrong might mean overly rationalistic, or stubborn, or an empty talker; this is the attitude of someone judging others using the lens of their own ideology, rather than absorbing and accepting their surroundings with an open mind and without preconceptions. Although the events of just one year are in this two hour movie, it is a very busy movie as it tries to pack in all of the problems of the world.
In the beginning, the death of Fernando’s brother-in-law happens at the same time as the younger sister’s wedding. I would think a political death is more shocking than one of natural causes, but since the wedding ceremony is carried out happily, if you are not careful, you may not notice that the uncle has been executed. The maid changes one after another from a Cuban, a Greek who fled her country, and then a Vietnamese woman. Shocked from the uncle’s death, it is fine that a political conscience that until now has been ignored is awakened, but why does the father join the reform in far-away Chile and not Spain of his own roots? Costa-Gavras, the father of this movie’s director Julie Gavras, possesed left-wing ideology and gained global fame with his Missing, which depicts the conspiracy of the American government in Chile; I can’t help but think that his daughter is exploiting this. It seems that Fernando and Marie stay in Chile for about two weeks, but after that, the two return as die-hard communists. If communist brainwashing is as simple as this, Lenin and Stalin wouldn’t have had so much difficulty. Fernando’s younger sister who married two or three months ago and should be very happy suddenly wants an abortion and Marie begins to play a big role as a feminist. What, she is already pregnant? And is she already unhappy with the married life just after getting married? This makes me want to recheck the numbers since two or three months doesn’t seem like enough time for this to happen. As an additional bonus, Marie grumbles about there being no true liberation for women even in a socialist household when Fernando angrily tells her, “You should be a good mother and give more of your attention to your family rather than having the maid look after our child,” because he is jealous of her being more famous than him with the publicity she gained from her article about the “Manifesto of the 343” demanding the lifting of the ban on abortion.
It is as if director Julie Gavras wanted to say:
“’Sorry, mommy and daddy have their hands full with their own problems, and you may suffer for it. But mommy and daddy are doing their best to pursue what they think is right. Perhaps you will understand the feeling of daddy and mommy when you are an adult,’ the mother says to her daughter.
To which the daughter responds, ‘No, daddy and mommy, you don’t have to shout about solidarity or unity to achieve it. If you lend a hand–even if you don’t say anything—you are connected to those around you. I get it.’”
This is my guess, but this movie still leaves me questioning whether making a movie that is crowded with all of the world’s problems is the best method to convey this message.