This story ran 4/12/2013 on Dane101.com

There’s a concept in Spanish called duende that we used to talk about a lot in my college poetry workshops. It is, to summarize in far too few words, a heightened emotional state that is connected to death, irrationality, struggle, darkness. Duende might be why a certain note of the blues, or the ragged edge in a singer’s voice, or a violin bow scraping against the string makes you shiver. Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who wrote extensively about duende, connected it in particular to flamenco music and dance, and, more recently, musician Nick Cave points to Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Tom Waits as masters of that dark shiver.

I say all this because Blancanieves, the third retelling of Snow White in the last two years, is thick with the darkness that breeds duende. It’s 1920s Spain, and, fitting to the decade, we’re in a classic silent, black and white film. Star bullfighter Antonio Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho) becomes crippled, and his wife dies giving birth to daughter Carmen (played by Sofia Oria as a child, then by Macarena García as an adult). Villalta remarries a greedy woman, Encarna (Maribel Verdú), and Carmen lives first with her grandmother, then in the chicken coop of her stepmother’s sprawling country estate, where her father, trapped in a second-floor room, secretly teaches her some of his trade…

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