Peppermint Frappé [1967]

Peppermint Frappe, Saura’s first of 9 films with his muse Geraldine Chaplin and the brilliant first chapter in his Bourgeois Trilogy (which also comprised of Stress is Three and Honeycomb), was highly reminiscent of the Bunuel and Hitchcock masterpieces El and Vertigo, respectively. The film, through delightful concoction of dark, brooding character study, and an alternately playful and pungent tone, provided a striking critique on Franco-era bourgeois morality and shallowness, and a lacerating examination on obsession and repression. The seemingly discordant opening sequence, showing a pair of male hands meticulously cutting images of models from fashion magazines purportedly for his personal scrap-book, exquisitely set the thematic context for what followed. The hands, as it turned out, belong to Julián (José Luis López Vázquez), a middle-aged physician who runs a clinic with the aid of his shy, introverted assistant Ana (Chaplin). When a long-time friend (Alfredo Mayo) introduces his much younger, newly-wed wife Elena (also played by Chaplin) to him, he immediately becomes enraptured by the carefree, liberated and outgoing lady as she reawakens a memory and also titillates his suppressed desires; he starts pursuing her with increasing vigour, albeit in futility, with his brazen obsession further fuelled by her casual flirtations and deliberate teasing, and he even starts moulding Ana, through a mix of cajoling and coercion, in Elena’s image. Understandably, these increasingly sordid and desperate attempts lead the tale to a disturbing climax. Loaded with socio-politico-religious imagery and commentaries, this gleefully perverse, subversive and captivating film boasted of an arresting central performance by Vázquez and an equally fascinating dual-turn in diametrically opposite roles (a reverse of what Bunuel did in That Obscure Object of Desire) by Chaplin.

Director: Carlos Saura
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Romantic Drama
Language: Spanish
Country: Spain