Film review: Las 13 Rosas

For the second time in two months, SBS has screened a politically-charged Spanish film starring the lovely Andalucian actress Verónica Sánchez. I reviewed the first such feature, El Calentito, here. Its setting was the 1981 attempted coup by old-guard franquistas and its effect on the blooming Madrid counter-culture of the early 1980s, as seen through the eyes of Sánchez’s character Sara, a nineteen year-old escapee from a conservative Catholic family who finds freedom in punk rock. Last night, Las 13 Rosas took us to the beginning of Franco’s rule, and portrayed the final days of the lives of thirteen women condemned to death for their anti-fascism.

The film begins with two members of the group addressing an impromptu public gathering. They try to exhort their audience to resist the fascist takeover, but by this stage it is too late – Franco’s troops are already marching on Madrid and the republicans are left with the naïve hope that the oncoming war in Europe will lead to Spain’s liberation from franquismo by its neighbours. (Of course, it didn’t – the Spanish, like the captive nations of eastern Europe, were left to their fate by the new world order forged at Yalta, and Franco became the West’s anti-communist ‘our son of a bitch’ until his death in 1975.) As the fascists take control of Madrid (and the red-yellow-burgundy tricolour of the Second Republic is replaced everywhere by the red-yellow-red ensign of reactionary/bourgeois Spain), they settle scores with their enemies, and one by one the women are discovered, arrested, imprisoned, and subjected to show trials. The film ends with their execution by firing squad (all based on real events), and with their final letters to their loved ones.

Sánchez plays the role of Julia, a nineteen year-old streetcar conductor who has dabbled in socialist activism but is not so ideological that she can’t date a nationalist soldier. She is arrested after distributing anti-Franco pamphlets and subjected to a rather nasty interrogation, which includes being forced to undress, being punched and kicked, and having her nipples burned with cigarettes. Imprisoned, along with the others, in an overcrowded and unsanitary jail, her natural rebellious streak manifests itself in many ways. She affirms her atheism when asked upon entering custody to state her religion, assists with the writing of a song mocking the jail’s squalor, lets live rats loose during mass, and refuses to deliver the straight-arm fascist salute when required. Even in the face of the firing squad which would execute her, she remains defiant, abusing and questioning the manhood of the fascist soldiers. Just like her role as Sara in El Calentito, she portrays a headstrong young woman not heavily invested in the political conflict around her, but who nevertheless poses a threat to the powers-that-be by her determination to enjoy the fruits of women’s liberation: Julia’s status as a working woman is as provocative to the reactionaries of 1939 as Sara’s music and sexuality would be in 1981.

The film is valuable not only for the human interest angle, but also for its insights into the politics of the era. The arrival of nationalist troops in Madrid is accompanied by a round-up of republican activists, and the film features real footage of an address to the nation by General Franco, calling on Spaniards to assist the authorities with hunting down suspects. Despite the broad range of ideological currents which supported the Second Republic (and despite the fact that they didn’t all get along with each other, cf. the battles between communists and anarchists during the Civil War), they are all subsumed by the franquistas’ anti-communism. Thus, streetcars have “red conductors”, prison vans are labelled “RED PRISONERS”, and the womens’ pamphleteering is described by the state prosecutor as “basically Communism and Freemasonry.” (Franco also had a weird thing about Freemasons.) Religion plays its role as well – everyone arrested seems to instinctively reach for their Catholicism as a means of protesting their innocence. Spanish flags are everywhere and xenophobia fuses into anti-communism: Franco’s speech refers to those who hide republicans as “bad Spaniards, that is to say, non-Spaniards.”

Las 13 Rosas paints a picture of the political conditions that accompany reactionary regimes. General Franco’s broadcast spoke of the need for totalitarianism (he actually used that word) to bring order and stability to Spain. But in order to pacify vibrant socialist, communist, radical-republican, and anarchist movements, his men entered homes without warrants, arrested suspects without any evidence of wrongdoing, physically and sexually abused detainees, and executed them without trial (except when they were given trials as fraudulent as any witnessed in Moscow during that era). And for what? To ensure a compliant and vulnerable supply of workers for foreign and domestic capital, and a steady stream of believers to fill the country’s Catholic congregations. The film demonstrates, better than any work of political science could, the truth of Corey Robin’s thesis in The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, that political conservatism turns nasty (and behaves rather un-conservatively) when faced with emanicipatory movements from hitherto marginalised groups. The Catholic/conservative/nationalist section of Spain initially reconciled itself to the end of the monarchy, and the political right formed government for a two-year period in the middle of the Second Republic, leaving many key social reforms untouched. But when faced with a Popular Front government with a strong mandate, union militancy, and talk of gender equality, it turned to the man whose party had won 0.07% of the votes at the 1936 general election, but who could provide the muscle to oust the republican regime.

In the end, Las 13 Rosas succeeded in depicting the inhumanity of the execution of a group of innocent young women without coming across as didactic or preachy. Its message is essentially feminist – just as the young women are exercising their newly-won freedoms to work and to vote, their lives are cut short by the actions of men, who betray their activities to the authorities and then administer brutal (in)justice. But it is also pro-youth: the older generations are quickest to greet the victorious fascist troops with straight-arm salutes and are most apprehensive about the younger characters taking control of their own lives. I can’t resist comparing it to El Calentito in the sense that it reminds the viewer of the ramifications that court intrigues have on everyday, street-level life: the coming of fascism means not only an end to republican activism, but also forces an ex-communist musician to pawn his instrument in order to raise the funds to flee the country. The ‘thirteen roses’, however, were denied the new birth of freedom experienced at the end of El Calentito, and their country would have to wait until 1975 for the happy ending.