Franco’s Monsters: The Fantasy of Childhood in El laberinto del fauno and Balada triste de trompeta

In an interview with Núria Triana-Toribio, Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia proclaimed that he set out to make films that were “not about childhood, not about the civil war, and not literary adaptations” (Buse et al 9). This interview took place well before the 2010 release of his most recent film, Balada triste de trompeta, and it appears that de la Iglesia has changed his mind about two of his three criteria. Balada triste de trompeta opens to Javier, a young boy whose father is imprisoned and later killed by Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War; the film then jumps ahead to his adult life during the waning years of the Franco dictatorship. The thematic combination of childhood and wartime is a common trope in contemporary Spanish cinema: just a sampling of Spanish films about growing up just prior to or during the civil war include Victor Érice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973), Carlos Saura’s La prima Angélica (1973) and Cría cuervos (1976), Jaime Chávarri’s Las bicicletas son para el verano (1984), Fernando Trueba’s Belle époque (1992), Emilio Martínez Lázaro’s Carreteras secundarias (1997), Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo (2001) and El laberinto del fauno (2006) and, of course, Álex de la Iglesia’s Balada triste de trompeta (2010). As this list would suggest, a number of contemporary filmmakers consider childhood a crucial lens through which to examine Spain’s relationship with its past of violence.

The two most recent films in the list above, El laberinto del fauno and Balada triste de trompeta, offer two distinct ways of engaging with the history of the Spanish Civil War and the postwar period. In a review of El laberinto del fauno, Paul Julian Smith argues that as Spain moves further away from that historical period, “the treatment [of the Spanish Civil War] has become progressively trivialized,” citing films such as Monxto Armendáriz’s Los secretos del corazón (1997) and José Luis Cuerda’s La lengua de las mariposas (1997) that feature “improbably cute kids” (6) to reiterate a theme that has been severely overused. Yet I contend that El laberinto del fauno uses the theme of childhood in a way that is unnecessarily safe, protective and morally satisfying for audiences, consequently repressing history even as it attempts to engage it. In contrast, Balada triste de trompeta offers a radically different view of the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, breaking with the trivialization that Smith laments. De la Iglesia uses childhood as a painful reminder of the past, graphically illustrating the ways in which that past can wound and mark its victims indefinitely.

This article positions Balada triste de trompeta as a critical response to El laberinto del fauno, placing the two films in direct dialogue. Thematically, they have much in common: both films begin in the years surrounding the end of the Spanish Civil War and employ the motif of childhood to address that historical period. However, El laberinto del fauno fails to address the political and psychological implications of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, while Balada triste de trompeta underscores the traumatic nature of the period and its lasting effects on the current generation of Spaniards. El laberinto del fauno conforms to a very standard reading of the child as the embodiment of humanity’s hope for the future, while Balada triste de trompeta marks the future as unstable through the image of a child figure that cannot come to terms with the horrors of his past, nor control his response to it. Balada’s child figure, Javier, is emotionally scarred by the war, and later given to psychopathic fits of anger; rather than the film’s symbolic hope for the future of Spain, this child stands in for the violence of the postwar period in Spain—incomprehensible but also irrepressible. This analysis of El laberinto del fauno and Balada triste de trompeta in juxtaposition reveals the ways in which the latter film takes...