Vacas

With Vacas, his first feature, the Basque director Julio Medem set out all the elements of his audacious and idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking: intricate, circular plots; richly sensual imagery and highly stylised camerawork; a deft interweaving of fantasy and reality; and a thoroughly subversive attitude to Spanish tradition and folklore. Vacas takes a staple Spanish genre--the epic historical melodrama with all its bombast and macho posturing--and kicks the stuffing out of it while pelting it with cowpats.

The action unrolls between two Spanish civil wars--the Second Carlist War of 1874-5, and the rather better-known conflict that started in 1936. An incident in the first of these sets up a feud between two farming families in a Basque valley, and the story leapfrogs down the decades taking in star-crossed lovers, log-chopping contests (a staple Basque competitive sport, it seems), mutilation, madness, incest, photography and any number of cows, through whose placidly bemused gaze we view a good deal of the action.

Though Medem is dealing with all the solemn Hemingway-esque elements of romantic Spanishry--honour, blood and death--his approach is too playful to admit any real sense of tragedy. Much of the time the tone is closer to myth, and there's more than a touch of magic realism: axes fly miles through the air, and a tree in the woods can apparently eat people alive. In the end, of course, love triumphs over all. Medem's films have since gained greatly in sophistication and technique, but there's exuberance about this debut work that's irresistible.

On the DVD: Vacas on disc has trailers for all five of Medem's features to date; filmographies for Medem and his two lead actors, Emma Suárez and Carmelo Gómez; and useful written notes on the movie by film historian Robert Stone. The transfer's clean and clear, doing justice to Carles Gusi's rich photography, with good sound and in the original ratio. --Philip Kemp