Life in Shadows

Born in a fairground tent during a screening of films by the Lumière brothers, Carlos spends his childhood watching Chaplin, falls in love with his bride-to-be during Thalberg's Romeo and Juliet, abandons his job as critic and documentary-maker when she's killed while he's out filming political riots, and finally finds his faith again after seeing Hitchcock's Rebecca. This semi-autobiographical film, produced on a small budget as part of Spain's 'amateur cinema' movement (yet looking totally professional in execution), deals with a man whose entire life is shaped by and dedicated to the movies... for better and for worse. As it examines the twisted relationship between life and art, it includes enough references to movies to make the likes of Godard, Wenders and De Palma seem relatively uninterested in the history of their chosen medium. But this is no clever academic work: in evoking its hero's obsession for both film and his wife, it predates (appropriately) the Hitchcock of, say, Vertigo, and achieves its emotional power through a fine performance from Fernán Gómez, later to become one of Spain's most impressive actors.