Blancanieves - A Tale of Black and White

Snow White with a difference: In 1920s Spain, acclaimed torero Antonio Villata (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is overjoyed as his beloved wife, flamenco dancer Carmen de Triana (Inma Cuesta), is expecting his child. But the couple's happiness is abruptly shattered when Antonio is seriously injured in an accident in the arena and Carmen collapses in shock. While doctors manage to save Antonio's life, his wife dies giving birth to their daughter together. Broken with grief and confined to a wheelchair, the torero henceforth refuses to see his daughter, who therefore grows up with her grandmother (Ángela Molina). But when she dies, little Carmencita (Sofia Oria) is taken to her father's country estate, where he lives with his new wife, nurse Encarna (Maribel Verdú). The girl quickly discovers that Encarna has nothing but hatred and rejection for her. As she matures into a young woman (Marcarena Garcia), the evil stepmother tries to put her plan to get her husband's money into action for good. First she pushes Antonio down the stairs and orders her lackey to murder Carmen as well. But she survives the attack and finds shelter with a troupe of petty toreros. It is the beginning of a great career for Carmen - but unfortunately not the end of her stepmother's murderous intrigues.

The temptation is great to accuse the silent film Blancanieves - A Tale of Black and White, shot in black and white, of merely swimming along artistically in the wake of the success of The Artist. It's true that filmmaker Pablo Berger only began shooting his ambitious work shortly after The Artist started its run of success. But he started working on this passion project long before that. It took Berger almost ten years to realize his vision. The result is an unusual fairy tale that bows to the great classics of the silent film era with numerous small allusions and that wants to show that a good story does not necessarily need words to be able to enchant the audience.

These are high ambitions that make one thing clear above all: Pablo Berger and his team have worked here primarily with their hearts and with all their passion. And although The Artist was very successful, it also took a fair amount of courage to strip a film of any technical finesse in the age of digital 3D cinema, to make it look deliberately old and reduce it to the essentials. With all due respect to the director's courage and his obvious passion, the only question that must be allowed is why it was necessary to tell this admittedly original variant of the popular fairy tale about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in this somewhat inaccessible way.

With The Artist, this made sense insofar as it showed a film world in upheaval, which worked excellently as an allegory for the transition to the digital age. Here, the silent film concept itself was repurposed into an important part of the story. This is not the case with Blancanieves - A Tale of Black and White. Here, the lack of color and sound are purely artistic stylistic devices, which certainly has its appeal at the beginning. But it gets more and more lost in the course of the running time, which is quite long at almost two hours. Sure, if you have a preference for movies from the silent era, this Spanish fairy tale is a real treat. But this torero Snow White is unlikely to appeal to more than a small niche audience.

Blancanieves - A Tale of Black and White has many strong aspects, from the cast to the technical execution to the occasionally wonderfully whimsical humor. However, its artistic ambition also makes the work difficult to access, somewhat unwieldy and even a little boring, especially in the middle section. Nevertheless, if you love ambitious European arthouse fare of the unusual kind, you can confidently take a trip down memory lane with Pablo Berger in more ways than one.

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp