After So Many Years

For the Fall 2015 issue of The Believer, I wrote an essay about El Desencanto, a cult-classic documentary in Spain that was released there in 1976, and will soon play in theaters in the US for the first time. The film is a kind of choral audiovisual memoir “written” by the Paneros, a family of writers whose deceased patriarch, the poet Leopoldo Panero, was a communist before the Spanish Civil War, only later to become a poet celebrated by the Franco dictatorship. He was survived by Felicidad Blanc, his seductively loquacious and resentful widow who had harbored literary ambitions of her own that were blotted out by her husband’s, as well as their three literature-obsessed sons: Juan Luis, the eldest, also a poet, who styled himself as part dandy and part Hemingway-esque macho; Leopoldo María, the middle son, yet another poet, but of the mad-genius, locked-in-an-asylum, multiple-suicide-attempt variety (he appears in three Roberto Bolaño novels); and Michi, the youngest, a playboy and dilettante, who was the invisible “guiding hand” driving the themes and drama of the documentary, as its director Jaime Chávarri put it. The film is a strange and singular work of art, just like the Paneros themselves.

El Desencanto means “the disenchantment,” and while Felicidad and her brood certainly ooze their pains and poisons on camera as they recall their sundry disenchantments (the father Leopoldo’s drunken temper, poetic rivalries between the brothers, Felicidad’s questionable parenting choices, the violent repressions of the dictatorship, and the ravages of prisons and institutionalizations, among other miseries), the family members are darkly enchanting. The film becomes a kind of myth-making performance art piece through which the Paneros rewrite their history, framing it as a novelistic saga of decline. Their incendiary poetic pronouncements and insistent literary allusions layer a mystique onto what otherwise might seem like simply an artistically eccentric dysfunctional family. And all the while, their poet-paterfamilias, whose legacy they savage, is robbed of his voice in the familial retelling that the documentary becomes. The Paneros’ “killing” of their father figure was read as a metaphor for Spain’s relationship to Franco’s legacy when El Desencanto was released the year after the dictatorship’s death. The film turned them into national legends.

The thing with legends, though, is that they are usually better left as just that—legends. These crafted hybrids of fact and fiction preserved by the amber of history are culture-tested narrative final products, polished and complete, unlike reality. When you revisit real-life characters after the time and place that created them has vanished, you risk not just deflating their residual stature in the present but also retroactively recasting their hold over the...