[In contrast to Saura's early] operatic films with their dramatic sweep of violent deeds and historical events, Saura's later works are more interior and subtle. They focus more narrowly on an individual within the close confines of a bourgeois family and stress the mental life of a particular consciousness—memories, dreams and fantasies—rather than external events. (pp. 16-17)

Saura's primary focus is the crippling influence of social and political forces on individuals, particularly during childhood, which is revealed through a return to the past or a reunion with family…. Saura's films achieve extraordinary subtlety in their psychological realism. He makes unusual demands on his actors, whose facial expressions and physical gestures must simultaneously convey both the masks required by the society and the underlying passions and ambivalences. Saura's films are masterpieces of repression in which the sub text is developed, not with the surreal wit or grotesquery of a Buñuel, but with the emotional intensity and psychological astuteness of a Bergman. As in Bergman's canon, Saura's films are woven together by recurring names, faces, characters, and situations that suggest a tapestry of recurring dreams. (p. 17)

Of all Saura's works, The Garden of Delights is the closest to Buñuel in its use of surreal symbolism; it depicts the discreet horrors of the bourgeoisie living under Franco repression. In tracing the mutual destructiveness of a powerful industrialist and his family of decadent pleasure-seekers, the film also evokes the grotesqueries of the Bosch painting … from which it derives its title….

[One of the assumptions] that is powerfully demonstrated in Saura's Garden of Delights is that by fully probing the fantasies of individuals, it is possible to perceive an entire culture and to demystify political dynamics…. By choosing [a brain-damaged] character to control the film's point of view, Saura makes the gap between inner life and outward behavior essential to the plot and dramatizes quite literally the crippling influence of Spanish society on an individual consciousness. The film suggests that this destructive influence has been operating, not just in the accident, but all of Antonio's life. The accident merely confirms what was already true—his emotional, mental, and spiritual deterioration. (p. 18)

Saura is masterful in controlling the modulation of tone between the bitter satire, which is sometimes comic or absurd, and the psychological reality of the emotional pain. For example, in the sequence where Antonio's neglected wife tries to re-enact their first love scene in a boat on an idyllic lake, the replay almost turns into a parody of An American Tragedy; yet, the yearnings of this woman are still poignant, and the economic basis of the rejection is still underscored.

The film implies that all members of the family and of the society have suffered the same psychic damage as Antonio. This symbolic point is rendered concretely in the final powerful fantasy where each member of the family is isolated in a wheel chair, rolling across an elegant lawn like crippled performers in a perverted minuet.

In Cousin Angelica there is a shift from blatant symbolism to a more subtle personal expression; the crippling of consciousness is neither so literal nor so melodramatic, and the boundaries between inner life and outer events are more obscure. (p. 19)

Like other artists who dramatize the development of consciousness (Bergman, James, Proust), Saura bases his creation on germinal sensory images. This process is explicitly described in one scene where Luis remarks, "One day Proust dipped a madeleine in his tea and his mouth was full of the smell of his grandmother's garden." This associative process of drawing a story out of rich, concrete images controls both Saura's creative method and the film's narrative structure….

The film is controlled by [the idea that you cannot see yourself as a child], for the adult Luis appears in all of his childhood memories; we never see him as a child…. After a while, we actually see the child in Luis, regardless of his external setting. We gradually understand that although Luis has come to bury his past, it is much more alive for him than the present and that his inner life is much more engaging than external events. This helps us to understand why he rejects Angelica as a woman and is much more attracted to her nine-year-old daughter. While he claims that being single means he is "free but alone," we see that he is actually bound to the ghosts from his past.

Yet like Saura, Luis is free to alter his memories, sometimes casting them with characters from his immediate environment…. Sometimes Luis's distortions are humorous—as when he pictures Angelica's father with his arm in a cast; although his uncle claims to have been wounded by shrapnel, it looks more like his arm was paralyzed in a fascist salute. Saura suggests that not only is our present determined by our past, but our past is reshaped by the present. The mediator is the individual consciousness.

The film opens with a powerful germinal image. As we hear choir boys singing, we see white mist drifting through a church schoolroom, which is illuminated by strange overexposed lighting; the camera slowly glides through wreckage, observing signs of violence from some unknown disaster. We do not yet know what happened, nor do we recognize the mode of reality—present event, nightmare, or memory. Yet the image immediately engages our attention and opens the door to Luis's consciousness. (p. 20)

Later in the film, when we return to this image, we realize it was a childhood memory of a traumatic incident in which Luis's school was bombed. In order to understand its full impact, we must learn what other memories it is associated with in Luis's mind…. The association between religion, death, and guilt is also strong in the memory of a theatrical performance of Christ's crucifixion…. All of [Luis's] memories reveal that, like the War, the Catholic Church effectively cripples the young with guilt and fear, inhibiting their enjoyment of sensual pleasures and stifling any rebellious political consciousness.

The other primary source of imprinting in Luis's childhood is art. While in many of his memories it is controlled by the Church (e.g., the religious pageant is evoked by music, the nightmare by the religious painting), the secular art is also powerful…. (pp. 20-1)

Reversing the central premise of Cousin Angelica, Cría Cuervos raises the question of what happens when you can see yourself as a child. An old Spanish proverb warns, "Raise ravens and they'll peck out your eyes."

This film presents the best portrayal of a child I have ever seen…. The intensity of Ana's passions is made so credible that, without any melodrama, we can accept a nine-year-old contemplating suicide and poisoning one of her family elders…. The child's perception of adult realities (e.g., her father's sexual adventures, which lead to his fatal heart attack, and his mistreatment of her mother, which is partly responsible for her death) is so convincing because, without fully comprehending all of the events, she intuits the emotional reality. Through her eyes, we are able to see the adults with a double perspective that may also partially reflect the adult Ana's consciousness…. As Ana's ancient grandmother sits in her wheelchair—paralyzed, mute, and expressionless—staring at yellowed photographs and listening to old phonograph records, we realize that her mind is totally absorbed in the past and that for her the present is dead. The young Ana feels great pity for this old woman, whom she would like to put out of her misery; as an adult, Ana will identify with this total immersion in memories. The grandmother evokes a remembrance of things past—not only of a Spain before Franco, but also of Antonio in Saura's own Garden of Delights.

Despite this intense inner life, on the surface Ana appears to be a "normal" nine-year-old, particularly when she and her older sister dance to pop records and dress up like women. In these scenes, Saura carefully avoids cuteness and sentimentality; he uses these potential clichés to enlarge the range of Ana's fantasy life…. Though the repressive Francoist society is still portrayed as shaping the individual consciousness of the protagonist—particularly through the self-centered domination of a militaristic father and the oppressive atmosphere of a rich, conservative family controlled by restrictive social and religious conventions—the social forces are further in the background than in previous Saura films. (pp. 23-4)