A man of early middle age touches a bald place on his head for a moment. In another film, it might be that he was thinking of his looks. In Carlos Saura's wonderful Spanish picture "Cousin Angelica" …, the movement is one of trying to correct the blurring of time and history….

When the hero, called Luis Cano, touches his head, he is trying to retrieve something lost. The idea of having the same actor play both the boy and the man tells us what we all know: that everyone is every age at the same time, eight and forty-eight and eighty, merely embossed in a slowly changing carcass. The film tells us, too, that people have faulty memories. In the present of the film, Luis is trying to put things in order…. Time passes after all. A boy grows into a man, a generation grows into aeons of...