User Reviews

Garci's "Tiovivo c. 1950" could be considered as a deserving heir to Camus' "La Comena", based on Camilo José Cela's marvelous novel. As its predecessor, "Tiovivo" has virtually no plot, and limits itself to representing the lives of a bunch of people in the Madrid of the post-war era.

The cast is simply impressive, it looks like just any actor who was available was summoned by Garci to star in his film. However, we would have liked to see a bit more of some actors who appear in little more than glorified cameos (Fernando Fernán Gómez, Ana Fernández or Beatriz Rico, to name just a few). There are some extremely fine performances from the likes of Alfredo Landa, Tina Sáinz, Andrea Tenuta or, surprisingly enough, Elsa Pataky and Francis Lorenzo. All of them make the most of their bit parts in this ensemble piece, but the heart and soul of the picture is Aurora Bautista, who plays a destitute woman who sells religious stamps.

Taking into account that the movie has virtually no plot, there is no apparent reason to make a two-hour-and-a-half movie. There are so many great stories, but I couldn't help to wonder whether the film would have benefited if Garci had kept a few of them for a further project. The eventual result is overlong, and definitely not as good as "You're the one" or "Historia de un beso", but it is still worth a watch if only for the great performances.

Overall rating: 7/10

'Tiovivo c. 1950', José Luis Garci's new film, is a complex story. It has more than 60 actors and all of them perform important roles. They embody those people who had to face the difficult times Spain was living in the middle of the Twentieth Century, after the Spanish Civil War.

In my opinion, the best interpretations belong to Ana Fernández, Elsa Pataky and Andrea Tenuda. My favorite one is Miss Fernández's, since she develops an excellent role in four and a half minutes only.

The technical aspects of this film are good, but its score is almost inexistent. Although 'Tiovivo c. 1950' has a runtime of two and a half hours, it is not a boring production.

In short, Garci's new film is better than other of his former projects, but it is not a masterpiece.

7/10

This movie has any coherent plot. It is more the portrait of the lives of different people in the hard years of post-war in Spain (the 40's), and how people manage to survive in a country desolated by the war. Like other films: la colmena or roma (fellini) it shows us lots of characters and some moments of their lives. Despite this style, Tiovivo is not as good as the movies it is like: more boring, less charismatic, the emptiness of a story makes it too hard to see. In addition, the 2h 30min it has does not help to make it easier. Not like la colmena (90 min) or Roma (100 min), the enormous longness of the movie makes it so hard and so awful that, despite the fact it is very well filmed, it has most of better Spanish actors and the scenes are interesting, the result is a boring never-ending film that could have been better if being shorter.

As happens with many movies nowadays, this one shuns the traditional script with one or two main stories in favor of the multi-story kind of script. We are presented with bits and pieces of the intertwining stories of some two dozen or more people, during 1950 in Madrid. In my opinion the use of this kind of script, no longer a novelty, is becoming tiresome lately. This movie in particular abuses of it. There are far too many characters and stories, and in the end no one of them has a chance to become especially interesting. The movie tries too hard to include every kind of story, every kind of situation, every kind of character, every kind social class, every kind of political view, becoming too long and boring in the end. And by trying to populate the movie with dozens of Spanish stars, as if to offset the script's deficiencies, it becomes pretentious. It could be interesting to watch it only f you're interested in having a glimpse of the not-so-bright life in Madrid during the 50s, although there could be better movies for this.

I wouldn't like to end this commentary without mentioning the actress playing the old destitute lady. I don't know the name of the actress, but she seems to have so many face- lifts that hardly fits the part of an old beggar in 1950 Madrid !.