The bullfighter Antonio Bienvenida once told the filmmaker Jaime de Armiñán that he never bullfighted for the people who filled the plaza. The director adapted that way of seeing life: “A film is for yourself. If you work with the idea of doing something commercial, you fall into a trap,” said the film director, who died on Tuesday in Madrid at the age of 97 after suffering a long illness.
Despite this thesis, Armiñán's films were very popular. Some of his films, such as The Love of Captain Brando, led the Spanish box office, and three of his films – My Dear Lady, The Nest managed to be nominated for the Oscar for best foreign film. Armiñán also managed to succeed on television, where he had started his career, with series like Juncal, about a bullfighter removed by a goring.
Born in Madrid in 1927 into a family of artists, the filmmaker's childhood was marked by the Civil War. In 1994, he published a kind of memoir, Diario en blanco en negro, where he introduced passages from the war and other memories of his life such as the resignation of his mother, who was forced to leave the theater due to family demands. .
Armiñán studied Law and then began working as a columnist. He carved out a career in television in the late 1950s that he combined with tasks as a screenwriter for other directors. Until in 1969 he debuted as a director with Carola de día, Carola de noche, Marisol's first film as an adult. The public turned its back on the film, but Armiñán knew that his place was behind the cameras.
Time showed that he was not wrong. Two years later she released My Dear Young Lady, a film that navigates between drama and comedy and that addresses a very advanced topic for the time: transsexuality. José Luis López Vázquez, in a state of grace, plays Adela, a woman who lives in a nondescript way in a provincial city. Added to her boredom is the strangeness she feels, partly due to her physical appearance, she grows a beard; Partly because of her feelings, she likes her maid, played by Julieta Serrano. Over time and after medical treatment, she discovers that he is actually a man.
Adela's love for her employee was an impossible love, something very present in Armiñán's films. In The Love of Captain Brando, the director explored the impossible relationship between a teacher, played by Ana Belén, and her 13-year-old student. The film, shot in 1974 at the end of Franco's regime, also traced the eternal issue of the Civil War through the character of Fernando Fernán Gómez, a republican who returned home after living almost 40 years in exile.
Fernán Gómez, López Vázquez, Paco Rabal, Fernando Rey, Concha Velasco... The great actors of Spanish cinema starred in many of Armiñán's films, giving shine to his cinema. It was a mutual favor because many of them achieved international recognition thanks to the roles that the director offered them.
There were many marginalized characters for whom the filmmaker had a predilection: “Marginal beings are much more interesting than normal ones. Dramatically and psychologically they offer great narrative possibilities,” he explained in an interview given to La Vanguardia in 1986 on the occasion of the Barcelona premiere of The Witching Hour.
The director wrote the script for this film in Sitges when he was a jury at the fantastic film festival. He had asked for the mornings free to rework the script about a couple, Paco Rabal and Concha Velasco, who tours the towns offering magic shows. “By placing the characters in a realistic environment that at the same time has a lot of magic, greater richness is produced.” Rabal and Velasco won the acting awards at the Seminci.
Armiñán's films remained in theaters during the eighties. Later, the director returned to television to direct highly successful series such as Juncal (1988) or Una gloria nacional (1993), both with Paco Rabal as the protagonist. He also presented some interesting film titles such as The Lame Pigeon (1995). He filmed his last film, 14, Fabian Road, in 2008 with Ana Torrent and Ángela Molina.
In recent years he has remained away from public life due to his illness, but Armiñán leaves behind his cinema as a legacy, a reflection of a time in the history of Spain and the idiosyncrasy of what is Spanish.
