[A] gratuitously baffling chronology is provided by Elisa, Vida Mia, of Carlos Saura. If finally incomprehensible,… the whole is more agreeable than the sum of its parts…. Saura does have a certain respect for his milieu and, as we have seen before, an obsessively trenchant gift for recalling the woes and hungers of childhood and their traumatic reappearance in maturity. I think he has exploited this yield to its limits—in The Garden of Delights, La Prima Angelica, Cria Cuervos—and now repeats himself, precariously (like Resnais, Fellini or Bergman), the more so when he resorts to involutions of narrative that alienate one's attention when he might better be securing it. This film appears to resume the prolonged visit of young Elisa … to her self-exiled but doting father …, living in isolation somewhere on the Castilian plains—while writing a book! (is this a trend or merely a coincidence...