Spanish thriller with Julian Sands

movie premiere
The low-budget thriller "Romasanta: Hunt for a Werewolf" tells the instructive story of a werewolf who got burned because of a woman. What makes the film especially edifying is that it is supposedly based on a real incident from the life of a Spaniard in the mid-19th century, whose last name serves as the title. LIDIA MASLOVA, not without surprise, caught the famous art-house actor Julian Sands in his role.
This time, much is not required from Julian Sands: it is more than enough that the artist has a sharp nose, disheveled hair and sad eyes. Having met such a look, any shameful wolf who dared to take a pig into Romasanta’s barn on a rainy night tucks his tail between his legs and runs away. And the frightened beauty Barbara, who is present at the same time (threatening to turn into a new Spanish sex symbol Elsa Pataky), on the contrary, gratefully throws herself on the neck of Romasanta, her older sister's live-in partner - to the displeasure of the latter, who just appeared at the door.
However, the extra relatives (the withered older sister and her mute daughter) are soon able to be sent away somewhere, and although the eldest shows the younger a sharp knife goodbye, she becomes very close to Romasanta and even allows him to soap herself in every way. If she had known what the hero used to make his rich white soap, she might not have hummed so much with pleasure and would not have directed his hand so decisively to the most polluted places. The fact is that Romasanta extracts the raw materials for his perfume laboratory in a separate saucepan from the buttocks of women he killed in wolf form. He is not able to do this with Barbara, because with her, as the hero admits at the end, already during the investigation, he “knew feelings and, possibly, love.”
It is because of this weakness that the werewolf can be arrested relatively painlessly and placed in the dock. His arguments about the fact that he is the ninth son in the family, and that the ninth son is always possessed by the devil, and that the wolf kills out of instinct, and that he himself, citizen Romasanta, now experiences genuine remorse for the murder of 15 women, initially makes an unfavorable impression on the court . However, there is a liberal old professor who assures that this is just an advanced, but completely curable case of a disease called “lycanthropy.”
Taking this into account, the Spanish queen cancels Romasanta's death sentence and replaces it with life imprisonment, but it is too late: her beloved Barbara, who spent so much energy promoting the capture, comes to the werewolf's cell and personally stabs him with a silver knife, although she herself is shedding tears. This scene looks extremely melodramatic and is accompanied by signature aphorisms that are so touching in B-movies: “My life belonged to you, but you gave me death, and nothing lasts forever except death.”
"Romasanta" belongs to those films, in anticipation of which you anticipate something extremely wild and merciless, but what you get is a completely mediocre and boring thriller, which has only one minor advantage over similar Hollywood products - namely poverty. Only thanks to her in “Romasanta” you can see a completely decent scene of the transformation of a wolf into a man, filmed, as it seemed to me, without any computer graphics, using only makeup and cellophane, the right light and a deft cameraman. Artfully swaddled in multiple layers of cellophane film, Julian Sands emerges from it as systematically and thoughtfully as only the owner of such a beautiful and quirky track record can, including films by Mike Figgis and Wim Wenders, Dario Argento and David Cronenberg.

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 163 dated 09/03/2004, page 13

Authors:

Lidiya Maslova

Themes:

The wolf was taken into circulation