Alexander Varderi

The issue related to the abuse of children and young people by some priests is in the Spanish case very complex and has very deep roots, since Spain is the cradle of Catholicism, spread with the conquest of Latin America, and is rooted in its structures. given its proximity to political power, the Church even participating in State decisions. In fact, during the Franco regime members of Opus Dei directed ministries such as Finance, Commerce and Industry; and since the advent of democracy until today they occupy key positions in the government and the business sector, although they have also been tried for illicit practices.
During the dictatorship, however, the impunity of the Church was absolute and its authority unquestionable. Ecclesiastical interference, over what could or could not be seen in the cinema, marked the long decades of Franco and mutilated numerous films with the relentless scissors of the censor. This, following the example of the Hollywood censorship code, designed by a Catholic priest during the years when, paradoxically, in Spain republican cinema openly addressed issues such as the sexual harassment of women ("Barrios slums", 1937), social backwardness (“Las Hurdes”, 1933), the double standards of the Church (“The water on the ground”, 1934) and criminal violence (“On the margins of the law”, 1936). Topics, these, that were prohibited until the death of the dictator and the advent of democracy, when the Church lost a power that it has been recovering in recent years. This, as a result of the conservative turn of society, now stimulated by the growing influx of Hispanic American immigrants and exiles, much closer to rites and worship, since secularization has not affected them as much as it has the Spanish. 

On the other hand, the absence of political responsibility trials for Franco's accomplices, the 1977 Amnesty Law that protects those involved, and the current power of the Spanish right that avoided its repeal in 2018 despite failing to comply with international regulations on UN human rights, have strengthened the most reactionary groups, allied with the Church, to the point that the dictator's own family felt they had enough influence to want to prevent his remains from being exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen.
Shrews, directed by the Spanish Juan Fernando Andrés and the Mexican Esteban Roel, ironically returns to “Spain, one, great and free,” through the macabre story of two orphaned sisters, surviving as dressmakers in a Madrid neighborhood during the 1951s. the fifties. A decade when massive masses, holy missions and industrial takeoff coexisted in the daily life of a country that began to open to the outside with the return to Madrid, in 1946, of the American ambassador, who had been away since the diplomatic isolation decreed by the UN in XNUMX.
The national uncloistering coincides, then, with the intimate confinement of Montse, the eldest, and Nia, the youngest, negatively influenced by childhood reading. “Terrible stories of evil people who took advantage of others. In those stories there was a huge and powerful ogre that watched over the humans”, and that was nothing but the “Bible”. This first scene, told by Nia's voice-over, establishes the tone of secrecy of the film and introduces the viewer to the dynamics of the apartment-cloister, filled with symbols of faith, where the sisters live together and where only their clients enter. , belonging to the thriving middle class that emerged from the new Spain. Although their situation will continue to be constrained by the designs of the man, be it the father, the husband or the confessor.
The absence of a maternal figure – “tears are not going to resurrect her but the Almighty will” – the father warns Montse on her deathbed – and of male authority – the father died, it seems that during the war between the two Spains, although history will take us to other, much closer causes, mark the actions of the protagonists. Montse, through a psychotic personality, and Nia through a strong and independent character that will clash with the fanaticism of her sister.
The style of the thriller and the horror genre where the film is framed gives the diegesis its dark character but with a twist: tragicomedy, as a consequence of the excessiveness and excess distinctive of “pulp fiction”, where filmmakers such as Álex de la Iglesia who is, precisely, the producer of “Musarañas” register. The particular use of the grotesque present in the Catholic imagination, which De la Iglesia combines with gore, will have its most accurate expression here, although the plot content will separate this film from the ridicule and carnivalization characteristic of the director's work.

“My sister Montse's nightmare began the day Mom died,” Nia's voice-over continues, in the scene where the father takes the cross that the shrouded woman has in her hands and puts it around her neck with the words “this Your mother carried the cross the day we got married.” Such a gesture establishes the solemn tone of the diegesis and surrounds the mystery of the young woman's imbalance, whose visceral fear of men keeps her imprisoned within her own house, where she would not want her sister to ever leave either. When he observes her through the window saying goodbye to a boy on her 18th birthday, he goes into a paroxysm that leads him to put her on her knees and force her to pray the “I am a sinner”, while he hits her hands with a stick saying: “this I do it for your own good. Men are instinctive. They only want one thing from you. They can hurt you a lot.”
This behavior, common in those who have suffered traumatic experiences, punctuates the frames where statuettes of the Virgin, paintings of biblical scenes, crucifixes and small images of the Sacred Heart attest to the flow of abuses, murders, psychological torture and physical violence that mobilizes the action. This establishes the connection between intolerance and sectarian Catholicism, with broad resonance during the “Time of Silence”—so dear to the novel by Luis Martín-Santos—which governed the behavior of the postwar generations, especially within the most vulnerable sectors. : women and children.
“You are worthless. Not even to make a cripple fall in love. Do you realize little one?” “I'm not your little girl. I'm not yours". “Of course you are mine. “You can’t get rid of me.” This imaginary dialogue between Montse and her father, who suddenly appears to her like a ghost in the shadows of the rooms, condenses the subjection of women to the male will that Francoism fostered, supported by the Church and the Falange through of the Women's Section; a branch of the party, in charge of training young women within the faith, fascist ideology and obedience to the paterfamilias. Three “virtues” that the film subverts to denounce the evils of a flawed society, given the impossibility of openly airing the atavisms, frustrations, misgivings and restlessness resulting from the war, misery, repression and isolation both inside and outside the borders. In this sense, the fact that the film was shot entirely indoors is allegorical of the closed smell that was felt in Spain in the 1950s and accentuates the reasons for the unstable clinical condition presented by the protagonist.

Trailer Shrews 

“My sister Montse's nightmare began the day Mom died,” Nia's voice-over continues, in the scene where the father takes the cross that the shrouded woman has in her hands and puts it around her neck with the words “this Your mother carried the cross the day we got married.” Such a gesture establishes the solemn tone of the diegesis and surrounds the mystery of the young woman's imbalance, whose visceral fear of men keeps her imprisoned within her own house, where she would not want her sister to ever leave either. When he observes her through the window saying goodbye to a boy on her 18th birthday, he goes into a paroxysm that leads him to put her on her knees and force her to pray the “I am a sinner”, while he hits her hands with a stick saying: “this I do it for your own good. Men are instinctive. They only want one thing from you. They can hurt you a lot.”
This behavior, common in those who have suffered traumatic experiences, punctuates the frames where statuettes of the Virgin, paintings of biblical scenes, crucifixes and small images of the Sacred Heart attest to the flow of abuses, murders, psychological torture and physical violence that mobilizes the action. This establishes the connection between intolerance and sectarian Catholicism, with broad resonance during the “Time of Silence”—so dear to the novel by Luis Martín-Santos—which governed the behavior of the postwar generations, especially within the most vulnerable sectors. : women and children.
“You are worthless. Not even to make a cripple fall in love. Do you realize little one?” “I'm not your little girl. I'm not yours". “Of course you are mine. “You can’t get rid of me.” This imaginary dialogue between Montse and her father, who suddenly appears to her like a ghost in the shadows of the rooms, condenses the subjection of women to the male will that Francoism fostered, supported by the Church and the Falange through of the Women's Section; a branch of the party, in charge of training young women within the faith, fascist ideology and obedience to the paterfamilias. Three “virtues” that the film subverts to denounce the evils of a flawed society, given the impossibility of openly airing the atavisms, frustrations, misgivings and restlessness resulting from the war, misery, repression and isolation both inside and outside the borders. In this sense, the fact that the film was shot entirely indoors is allegorical of the closed smell that was felt in Spain in the 1950s and accentuates the reasons for the unstable clinical condition presented by the protagonist.

The suffocating internal climate with its sacred, if not fascist, certainly absolutist and extremist emblems, mirrors the equally rarefied external environment; and where political emblems took on threatening overtones, as they muzzled the people, forcing dissidents to operate underground, within a context of violence institutionalized by the State. A context in which women and children were collateral victims due to their condition of inequality and their position of servitude with respect to the man who, sure of his indisputable authority, demanded, decided and imposed, even from beyond.
The power of the masculine within the family is confirmed by the appearances of the dead father at key moments to humiliate his daughter. The first time, accusing her of not having gone to the cemetery to see her mother, who died in childbirth while conceiving Nia. The second, prohibiting him from going out on the street because he was in mourning. And the third, blaming her for her inability to seduce a man, being able to then reaffirm his power over her both mentally and physically. And if Montse is her father's property, she intends for Nia to be hers; Although the younger sister, born with the first generation of women set to challenge patriarchal structures, is not willing to be a slave to either the Lord or Montse. That's why she throws the crucifix under the bed and turns against the elder, not only allegorically but really when, with Carlos, a masculine presence of flesh and blood enters the diegesis.
The young and attractive neighbor upstairs discovers her asleep on the landing, after a fight with her sister, and covers her with a blanket, leaving an indelible impression on him like an image of beauty that instantly seduces him. But Montse's intervention will divert the action towards the monstrous, when she turns him into her prey by knocking on the door looking for help, as a result of having fallen down the stairs. She opens it and, seeing him bleeding, quickly closes it; not so much because of the blood but because of the sex of the intruder. Although when looking at a painting on the nearby wall, where she sees Jesus Christ helping a person in need, she opens it again and finds him unconscious on the floor.
Here, the influence of religion on Montse, her fear of man and her violent behavior reach a peak, as she has found in Carlos the prey she needed to empower them. In fact, the rest of the film will revolve around the young man, immobilized in a bed by his broken leg and the morphine that he administers with food to keep him drugged. Only Nia's presence, accompanying him and comforting him without suspecting her sister's machinations, will keep him alert and prevent him from completely succumbing to her sister's purposes, immersed in an atavistic dread, but sexually stimulated by that dark object of her desire. . Horror and lust will join, then, her rivalry with Nia for the attentions of the prisoner, who will lead her to strengthen the psychological ties between pleasure and death, not from the orgasm like Georges Bataille's "little death", as it is. would have wanted, but from an onanistic “erotic fixation” unweighted, however, from the father's memories, by discovering a feminization that had remained buried under the trauma.
“With Carlos I feel like a normal woman,” she will confess to Nia, even though the man's indifference and his approach to her sister will unleash the animal that lives in her. Those shrews or “small rodents that dig long caves under the ground, far from other animals. They have solitary habits and some have poison glands to immobilize larger prey,” as Nia's voice-over will define, once the cycle of horror and crime has closed. Seeing herself excommunicated, that is, unable to merge with the body and blood of her beloved in a profane Eucharist, Montse will come out of her burrow and unleash the traumatic memories, dormant under the effect of the morphine that she also consumes to anesthetize the horror, immersing himself in a crusade against the masculine and his admirers. 

One of them will be a circumstantial victim of the scare: Carlos' girlfriend who, upon finding out from Nia that he is in her house, will go looking for him; Although Montse will kill her as soon as she enters the prisoner's room, and then she will begin to dismember her to hide her remains in the walls of the apartment just as she did with her other ghosts, in a temporary implosion where the events intermingle and the events become confused. feelings. This, mirroring Don Siegel's film “The Beguiled” (1971), which the filmmakers recognize as one of his influences; in the way in which the feminine creates a fence of rivalries, jealousies and desires around the masculine trapped in its filigree, and which ends up being sacrificed to allow them to reclaim their subjectivity in order to survive the destruction. The immolation of the object of desire then guarantees the preservation of a space free of male intrusions, in which they feel safe to continue caring for their most intimate fears resulting from the harassment of a voracious and annihilating other.
That other, at the root of Montse's pain and imbalances, will have a greater specific weight here, as the father himself is the culprit of the abuse. An abuse, of which there was also a fruit that was also sacrificed, adding to the list of impaled bodies whose hands, like those in the hallucinations of the protagonist of Roman Polanski's “Repulsion” (1965), seemed to emerge from the walls to claim her. Carlos, for his part, will try to escape the fence where he lies captive by psychoanalyzing his jailer, in a monologue where he reveals to her the role that mystical fanaticism has in his inability to verbalize the damage. The shock of seeing herself face to face in the mirror of another, and in the presence of Christ observing her from a portrait on the wall, breaks the chains that made her a prisoner of herself, and gives her the strength to tell her sister the why the man panicked and his inability to cross the threshold of that apartment turned into a tomb.
The confession scene, also presided over by a portrait but of the parents, will give meaning to the clues that the diegesis has been giving to the viewer throughout the film. The meeting of the truth will have the density of other confidences between siblings, regarding the sexual encounter with the father, such as that of Pablo and Tina in “The Law of Desire” (1986) by Pedro Almodóvar. Here, however, it will not unfold from the monotonous revelation of Tina, whose transsexuality was motivated by the need to please her father in his role as consensual lover, but from the drama of the father's rape, as he "confuses" Montse. with his wife—something that Labyrinth of Passions (1982) by Almodóvar himself focused on with ridicule and excess in the character of Queti.
“Mom's death changed everything. He changed dad. He fell ill with love. He insisted on remembering her in every detail, in every thing, in every person; especially in his eldest daughter, who looked more like his wife every day and confused me with her,” Montse confesses to Nia, from a lucidity resulting from the conversation with Carlos about the truth, and from the sharpening of her senses as a consequence. of having been a victim of that unspeakable terror. But by rebelling to reveal herself to her, Montse manages to break the psychological chains that held her submissively to her father, having ended her physical restraint when she poisoned him upon realizing that he was beginning to become dangerously interested in Nia.
This crime will finally be atoned for, once Montse has verbalized it to her sister who, terrified, will break the symbols of conformity to her fate imposed on the woman of Franco's regime, with whom she does not identify given the still inarticulate feminism of her generation, and will open the tombs hidden behind the walls seeking to openly expose the furtive and clandestine behavior of his father in, among other horrors, the corpse of his son, the product of that desecration. “He abused me for years. "I read you passages from the Bible so that you would fall asleep early and not hear what was happening in my room," Montse continues, finishing demolishing Nia's last insecurities, and affirming her resolve to free Carlos from a confinement that has become more nauseating. by the airy drama a few steps from the room where he remains immobilized. Something that the film will address through the struggle between two ways of understanding the feminine, in its relationship with the masculine, within the guidelines of genre cinema as an escape route to release the voice that had remained repressed by men.

In this sense, Montse's will be heard from the only place where it could be heard during the Franco regime, that is, the house in connection with the State, whose intolerance was reaffirmed in women by subjecting them to patriarchal control. But by annihilating her father, she appropriates her voice, distorting the ideal image of femininity according to which she had to deny herself in order to feel complete; and, therefore, she challenges, from that home-prison, the dictates of the regime, symbolized by a progenitor as devastating as the regime itself. Nia's, for her part, will be heard from the street, which she has appropriated through a gaze that, following that of women born after the war, will no longer perceive the outside as her sister's from the protection of some curtains, but will identify with those who, having a more open way of looking, have left the window to go down to the street in order to rebel against the dictates of patriarchy both inside and outside the house.
By rescuing Carlos from his confinement and, after a violent fight with Montse, managing to get him out of the house, Nia will also gain the control over herself that, since the disappearance of her father, was in the power of her sister. The last sequence, where the young people seal their gratitude for having each other with a kiss and she enters the house to console Montse, will mark the disappearance of terror and the break with the past, leaving the ending open for the viewer to respond, from the place of their own prejudices and anxieties, to the questions raised here regarding the future of the protagonists.
The film by Juan Fernando Andrés and Esteban Roel describes the far-reaching consequences for the victim of child abuse, and exposes the dysfunctionalities of institutions designed to exert strict social control over the wills of the weakest. Church, Family and State constitute here a triple devastating trinomial for the protagonists since it has usurped their right to be, leading them to a spiral of violence where not only the person responsible, but innocent beings - Carlos' girlfriend, a client and her daughter, the baby resulting from incest—have succumbed to the fanaticism of others, filling another page in the catalog of intransigence with which those in power satisfy their murky agendas. This, in a historical situation where the Church is being investigated, not only for sexual abuse but for financial corruption; The Family disintegrates among the toxic vapors of tainted relationships; and, to speak only of the Spanish case, the democratic structures of the State are seriously compromised by the increase in ultranationalism, populism and separatism as a consequence of the intransigence of the different sectors and political groups, guilty of manipulating the will of the citizens.
Faced with this panorama, Ibero-American cinema maintains a critical and combative position against the status quo, within elastic and flexible parameters where everything falls and everything fits and no one knows very well where it comes from or where it is going, in view of the process. of prevailing disintegration and the lack of future prospects, especially for the new generations. Something that in Latin America is observed in political absolutism and social polarization between extreme poverty and wealth, leading many young people to emigrate or fall into the underworlds of despair; and in Spain, thanks to the protection network offered by social services and a better supported economy, it allows them to postpone themselves in a situation of indefinite dependency where the responsibilities of the adult world continue to be in the hands of their elders.