Happy endings, in fairy tales, are commonplace. Lost princes and children make their way home. In horror films, the missing might stay gone forever, and children will remain fretted over long after the credits roll. In "The Orphanage," a moody suspense film from Spain, audiences and critics alike have found a pleasing mix of terror and sadness in a story of a mother's desperate attempt to protect her chronically ill son from harm. It opens here Friday.
After earning $33 million in Spain, "The Orphanage" - that country's selection for the 2008 foreign language category at this year's Academy Awards - has garnered rave reviews in the United States.
The writer and screenwriter, who were recently in Boston to promote the movie, found inspiration in films and books with ambiguous endings. As with one of their favorites, "The Innocents" (based on Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw"), some viewers see evidence of psychological disturbance in an unhappy home, while others can find scenes that back up a supernatural explanation. Still others see both.
The film's setting - a spooky stone mansion on Spain's rainy northwestern coast - recalls many other ghost-in-unhappy-household movies, including "The Others," starring Nicole Kidman. Even though "The Orphanage" is "presented by" and coproduced by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro ("Pan's Labyrinth" and "The Devil's Backbone"), the director and screenwriter insist that the long shadow of grief, not the literal shadows onscreen, is the most important factor in the film's harrowing story.
Sergio G. Sánchez recalls reading "Peter Pan and Wendy," by J.M. Barrie, and being "haunted" by an illustration of the children's mother, Mrs. Darling, waiting by the window for her lost children to return. "To me, that is the cruelest scene in literature - what would it be like to tell the story of Peter Pan from the point of view of the mother?" says Sánchez, who is 34 and grew up in Asturias, where "The Orphanage" was filmed. A fan of classic horror films like "Rosemary's Baby," "The Exorcist," "Aliens," and "The Omen," he sees a thread of "interrupted motherhood" going through the "best, most understated movies."
Sánchez watched a lot of them as a kid: "I was sick, in and out of hospital, for much of my childhood, and I spent a lot of time in bed, reading. Or being scared that I was going to die." The youngest, by far, of several children, he worried that his parents would die, too. "That's not a fear that's articulated in the film. But I do remember being that age that little Simón [Roger Príncep] is and thinking, you can no longer lie to me about certain things. Tell me the truth."
Juan Antonio Bayona, the director, responds in both English and Spanish, as he quotes from Barrie's novel. "Full of mischief, that book, 'Peter Pan.' He'll come back and visit, as long as 'children are happy, careless and heartless.' Egoista! Children are selfish, completely."
Both Bayona and Sánchez are particularly delighted that the film's eeriest scenes, which transform the children's game of "Statues" into a heart-stopping sequence, need no subtitles to be understood. The last 30 minutes of the film are nearly free of dialogue and all the creepier for it. "No disrespect to Sergio, but I kept asking for less, less, less," says Bayona.
"The Orphanage" carries Spain's hopes for an Academy Award nomination in the best foreign language category, just as "Pan's Labyrinth" did last year. ("Pan's Labyrinth" earned six Oscar nominations, but it was "The Lives of Others," a drama from Germany, that won in the foreign language category.)
Del Toro, an immensely popular figure among international film writers and fans, presented "The Orphanage" to the press at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, leading to the impression, Bayona and Sánchez say, that he'd been shaping the film's script from the beginning. Not true, says Bayona, "He made suggestions, and about half of which we rejected, but one thing is clear: Without him, we would not have gotten our budget to begin."
Bayona first met del Toro when, as a 17-year-old correspondent for a Barcelona TV station, he brazened his way through an interview with the Mexican director. "Guillermo thought I was a 10-year-old boy with sideburns who'd been given a microphone," says Bayona, who looks like an adult version of Simón in "The Orphanage." "I can't remember what I asked him, because I was such a fan, but he liked my questions."
When del Toro returned to Spain to shoot "The Devil's Backbone" and "Pan's Labyrinth," Bayona kept him abreast of his career: In his 20s, he'd become a rising director of short films, music videos, and commercials. One acquaintance on Spain's film festival circuit was Sánchez, who'd grown up in Asturias but attended New York University's screenwriting program in the early 1990s. ("I enrolled in the TV and film directing program and quickly realized I was never going to be able to pay for making my movies," says Sánchez. "I switched to screenwriting because writing is always going to be cheaper.")
Upon returning to Spain, though, he was able to finance his own short film, a calling card by which he hoped to direct his own first screenplay: "The Orphanage." When Bayona saw the script, they agreed to join forces. "Until del Toro came on, it was hard to get the financing. Years went by - I think six years," says Bayona.
Another key to the film's success in Spain, they believe, is the surprising cast. Lead actress Belén Rueda is a household name there who has hosted game shows, morning news, and starred on evening dramas and variety programs. In 2004, she broke into film with a role as a crusading lawyer opposite Javier Bardem in "The Sea Inside," a drama about a man's campaign to die with dignity. "If you're looking for her English-language equivalent, there isn't really anyone like her," says Sánchez. "One thing Belén is not known for, though, is darkness. She's gorgeous, a glamorous figure in real life, yet she plunged so deeply into this woman's anguish, you no longer recognize her."
What the director and screenwriter didn't know, when they floated Rueda's name to producers, was that some years earlier, one of Rueda's children had died in infancy. "The producers were quite upset with us," said Bayona. "They said, didn't you know? But we did ask. She did speak of it. Only a little. She gave it all in her performance. And you can see how she turned this pain into something beautiful."
