Leonardo Favio’s Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf announces
itself as based on a “famous radio drama,” but the narrative has agedly mythic
roots, and the film often achieves a sense of not having been crafted as much
as excavated or revealed. Nazareno is the seventh son of a father who was
warned that such a child would be a werewolf; the father and other boys now
dead, he’s grown to young adulthood without the curse coming to pass, but then
he falls in love with the beautiful Grizelda, and the wheels of fate start to
turn (the meeting of lycanthropy and sexual desire rather anticipates Paul
Schrader’s approach to remaking Cat People). While feeling entirely distinct,
Favio’s film often brings Pasolini to mind: in the rich and unfiltered-feeling
local flavour and almost aggressive absence of conventional cinematic polish
(the swooning treatment of the lovers is a prominent exception); in the use of non-professional
actors and the very basic approach to evoking the supernatural (a sequence in
which an old woman relishingly demonstrates how she can change into a variety
of animals could hardly be more simply conceived, but is rendered irresistible through
the woman’s robust and sustained laughter). The evocation of the underworld has
its Trilogy-of-Life aspects to it too (for example, the glimpses of naked activity
in the background), but the character of the devil comes as a surprise, marked
by longing rather than malevolence, regretful that he experienced neither being
or having a son (a recurring preoccupation of the film), quite poignant in the
request he makes of Nazareno, rendering the film’s final moments both beautiful
and melancholy . This viewer was rather surprised to hear the tune of Johnny Mathis’s
When a Child is Born used as a recurring love theme; research indicates
that the melody is Soleado, used here before its appropriation as a
Christmas hit.
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