If, in a way, Cría cuervos was the culmination of the line taken by Saura in Peppermint frappé, and Elisa, vida mía constituted a kind of questioning on the author's part of his own work and personality, Los ojos vendados indicates a new point of departure. Saura, still true to himself but having exorcised his ghosts, freed from the need to resort to a symbolism that to some seemed excessively obvious and to others unduly cryptic, confronts in a spirit of inquiry the problems of post-Franco Spain through characters who throw themselves desperately into the search for their own identity. Torture, "white terrorism," the struggle to find a reason for living—or dying—and to pass from the condition of spectator to that of participant are, among others, the themes Saura lays on the table, in a game at once relentless and tender, in which "theatre...