It starts out giving the appearance of being a straightforward domestic melodrama. Not a psycho-sexual melodrama, but just a very ordinary story about a young woman dealing with rather ordinary problems. Even when something fairly startling happens there’s nothing bizarre about it.
Ana (Emma Cohen) lives on the island of Madeira with her father, a very respectable archaeologist (played by Howard Vernon). He’s a widower. Ana is his only child. They seem quite close, but not in a weird way. When Ana announces that she is getting married her father seems a bit upset but that’s normal and understandable. It will obviously be rather lonely living in a big house alone after his daughter moves out.
The first very subtle sign of oddness is her father’s reaction to her impending marriage. He hangs himself. It’s a shocking to do but there’s nothing inherently bizarre about it. A man in his position might well feel that without his daughter his life will be empty and meaningless. He has built his life around her. Which may not be healthy if taken to excess but again it’s the sort of thing that does happen.
We have already had indications that even before Ana’s marriage announcement her father was bored by life. Boredom is a key theme that runs throughout this movie.
Ana leaves Madeira, moves to a big city and builds a new life as a jazz singer. There’s a burgeoning love affair between Ana and jazz musician Bill (Robert Woods). Ana seems to be reluctant to let things move too quickly.
Everything about this movie is very subtle. We just get tiny clues that something might be amiss. Ana has dreams. We assume they’re just dreams. Things that happen in her dreams happen in real life. Whether her dreams predict the future or whether something stranger is going on remains ambiguous.
She begins another love affair, with theatrical producer Miguel (Ramiro Oliveros).
She ends up back on Madeira. She hangs out with a circle of idle rich people.
Carla (Françoise Brion) and Pipo (Philippe Lemaire) have an open marriage. Maybe it’s becoming a bit too open for Carla’s liking. Maybe the middle-aged Pipo is a bit too interested in Ana. This little circle also includes Tina (Alice Arno).
Several murders occur. This is starting to feel like a giallo. There’s certainly an atmosphere of decadence.
There are however hints that there is something else happening. Perhaps Ana is psychologically haunted by her past. Or perhaps she is being literally haunted. Perhaps her father is reaching out for her from the grave. At the end we find out if there is really a supernatural element at work.
What’s really interesting is the very low level of erotic content and the almost total absence of any kind of sexual perversity. There is no indication of any incestuous relationship between Ana and her father. There is not even any indication of incestuous desires on the part of either father or daughter.
At this point we need to address the question of the multiple versions of this movie. The Other Side of the Mirror was a Franco-Spanish co-production. There were three different versions released - The Spanish, French and Italian versions. What’s really fascinating is that the French version was an entirely different cut with a lot of extra material, with one of the main characters eliminated and an additional main character (played by Lina Romay) added, although utilising about three-quarters of the original Spanish film. This French version, Le miroir obscène, was apparently so different that it was in effect a totally different movie dealing with totally different themes. But the extra material was apparently all shot by Franco.
And apparently the Italian release is yet another rather different cut.
Censorship was still fairly strict in Spain and the Mondo Macabro Blu-Ray offers only the Spanish cut. One might suspect that, given the much looser censorship in France, the French version might develop a theme of father-daughter incest that Franco could not address in the Spanish version. But apparently the French version switches the focus entirely away from the father and onto Ana’s relationship with her sister (in the Spanish version she has no sister).
So my suspicion is that Franco did not see the father-daughter relationship as incestuous at all. The real link between Ana and her father is boredom, and a mutual fear of abandonment. They both feel lonely and disconnected from other people, and adrift.
It’s also possible that this movie is one of Franco’s occasional attempts to do something more mainstream. It got rave reviews from Spanish critics.
Given Franco’s obsessive love for jazz it’s likely that the idea of doing a totally different arrangement of the same basic material to create a kind of improvised variation would have appealed to him immensely.
The Other Side of the Mirror is an oddity in Franco’s filmography but it is an interesting oddity. Recommended.
It’s perhaps worth noting than in 1970 Alain Robbe-Grillet had done more or less the same thing, using mostly the same footage edited in a different way to create two totally different movies, Eden and After (1970) and N. Took the Dice (1971).
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