{"id":493,"date":"2025-11-11T16:36:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T16:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/?p=493"},"modified":"2026-07-17T14:03:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T14:03:00","slug":"el-desencanto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/el-desencanto\/","title":{"rendered":"The Disenchantment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Here I am, Leopoldo Mar\u00eda Panero, son of a drunken father and brother of a suicide, pursued by birds and memories that lie in wait for me every morning, hidden in the brush, screaming for memory to end and for the recollection to turn blue, and to moan as I pray to nothingness to die.\"<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poem by Leopoldo Mar\u00eda Panero<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

While not strictly a \"film\" in the conventional sense, but rather a documentary, The Disenchantment (El desencanto, 1976) is, in my opinion, along with The Spirit of the Beehive, one of the great cinematic documents for understanding the Spain of the late Franco era. By its very nature, it transcends that scope entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the surface, The Disenchantment is merely a dialogue between the widow and the three sons of the regime's poet, Leopoldo Panero. It centers on the omnipresent void left by the dead poet\u2014a veiled stone statue, never actually seen\u2014which the family intends to erect in his hometown square of Astorga.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a sense, the film is nothing more than a dialogue among a very peculiar, literary family revolving around the metaphor of the dead father: the authoritarian, omnipresent figure whose death his children desire\u2014whether consciously or not\u2014but whose shadow will continue to dictate their destinies throughout their lives. Furthermore, the film's release one year after Franco's death caused it to transcend the strictly domestic sphere and enter the social realm. It became a metaphor for Spanish society following the dictator's death and the \"disenchantment\" of the Transition\u2014a period that, far from being a liberation, revealed what the dictator\u2019s figure had previously obscured. It has been aptly said that if The Disenchantment was the metaphor for Francoism, After So Many Years (Despu\u00e9s de tantos a\u00f1os)\u2014a new documentary on the same family made by Ricardo Franco nearly twenty years later, in 1994\u2014became the metaphor for the Transition (T\u00faa Blesa, Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Zaragoza).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The director, Jaime Ch\u00e1varri, stated that the intention behind this project was to convey that \"the power of the family is equal to the power of the State, or any other. There comes a moment when you must rebel against that tyranny.\" Leopoldo Mar\u00eda, the middle son and undoubtedly the most compelling of the three, immediately retorted: \"I do not believe in family epics, because no one is going to tell the truth.\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mother, Felicidad Blanc\u2014a writer and friend of poets Luis Rosales and Luis Cernuda\u2014was a well-to-do girl from Madrid, daughter of a doctor who was a first cousin to the mother of Josemar\u00eda Escriv\u00e1 de Balaguer (founder of Opus Dei). She would say she fell in love with the poet upon reading a love poem in which he called her beautiful. The youngest son, Michi, describes her as a woman who lived subjugated to family whims and shouting, like a Victorian piece of furniture\u2014quiet, discreet, and subservient\u2014or, in the words of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, \"Par d\u00e9licatesse, j\u2019ai perdu ma vie\" (Out of delicacy, I have lost my life).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The eldest brother, Juan Luis Panero\u2014also a poet and an alcoholic\u2014essentially presents himself as an imitation of a novelistic character, maintaining a distant, ambivalent relationship with his father and a conflicting, love-hate relationship with his middle brother, Leopoldo Mar\u00eda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jos\u00e9 Mois\u00e9s Panero (Michi), the youngest brother\u2014a future night owl, partygoer, womanizer, and an alcoholic like his father and brothers; a writer without a body of work and author of unpublished stories\u2014is, in this film, still so young that he seems to wander among the others with a certain bitterness for not yet being anyone of importance in such an illustrious family. He is a man whom the writer Vila-Matas would describe as someone who dreams of \"ceasing to be a poor child out of a Dickens story, marrying an heiress like Barbara Hutton, divorcing her quickly, and, of course, never having to write.\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leopoldo Mar\u00eda Panero\u2014the middle brother, the poet of darkness and desolation, but also the bohemian, the leftist radical who would spend time in prison, the alcoholic, the heroin addict, and the diagnosed schizophrenic who attempted suicide several times and would eventually die in a psychiatric hospital\u2014is the one who articulates the raw, painful word: the real behind the pantomime, the truth behind the epic legend (Lacan), and the failure of the word to bypass madness. For him, madness in his poetry becomes a form of lucidity in the face of death and pain (\"In childhood, one lives; afterwards, one survives\").<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a way, while Juan Luis became the substitute for the living father for their mother after the patriarch's death, Leopoldo Mar\u00eda became the substitute for the dead father\u2014the target of the mother's constant complaints regarding the void left by her husband's passing\u2014while Michi became the one trying to understand, explain, and redeem her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eighteen years later, in 1994, director Ricardo Franco filmed After So Many Years, a sequel to The Disenchantment in which he brings the three brothers together again (the mother having since passed away) to recount how their lives have unfolded since the first film appeared.<\/p>\n\n\n

Accessed 1 times<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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While not strictly a \"film\" in the conventional sense, but rather a documentary, The Disenchantment (El desencanto, 1976) is, in my opinion, along with The Spirit of the Beehive, one of the great cinematic documents for understanding the Spain of the late Franco era. By its very nature, it transcends that scope entirely...<\/p>\n

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