Taking advantage of his opportunity to attend a screening of the film, our Federico García Lorca enthusiast and connoisseur Victor, has composed his opinion of Little Ashes. In his review, Victor focuses on the film’s depiction of its main character and the very man who has inspired many people through his life and his individualistic prose.

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I first met Federico García Lorca in a used bookstore back when I was a teenager. According to the introduction to the slim paperback collection of his early poems I randomly pulled out of a discount bin, Lorca had been just as terrified and self-loathing of his own sexuality as I was of mine, so I paid my fifty cents to the cashier and walked back home to languish in the closet (as was fashionable at the time) with my new best friend.

Thankfully, neither of us were in there for too long. I was drop-kicked into a brand new life where I didn't have to hide anymore, and Lorca's siblings finally died off, allowing for the gradual publication and production of his most revolutionary work, which had been denied and suppressed for more than half a century. However, it wasn't until I began research for my series of biographical articles for the Little Ashes Promo Blitz site that I fully realized just how courageous and determined my old friend had been to fight the oppression of women and sexual minorities by consistently upping the ante of controversy with each play he produced, increasingly desensitizing the audience and repeatedly forcing them to confront their own bigotry and hypocrisy.

I'll come right out and say it: the blunt honesty, openly and fiercely masculine sexuality, and utter lack of political correctness (undoubtedly easier to pull off back before GLBT politics were even invented) are precisely what I love the most about Lorca's "impossible theatre." Turns out he'd had a sizeable pair of cojones all along! Who knew?

Unfortunately, for all its good intentions, Little Ashes' conspicuous lack of balls is what ultimately ruins it for me. Although I feel the widespread praise Javier Beltrán has received for his performance is well deserved, the Lorca written into the script is the intensely introspective, depressive, sensitive, deeply conflicted young man I had envisioned in my youth. The controversial nature of his works, particularly his later plays, is never broached, and his sexuality so muted we'd be forgiven for believing that, having failed to penetrate Dalí, he died a lonely virgin as there isn't even a hint of any subsequent relationships. There is a single scene of him exhorting the patrons of a café to sign an anti-fascist petition, but with no indication where this fire of resistance has come from in him. His pivotal, life altering trip to the Americas, the subject of what is widely regarded as his most important book of poems, is only given two or three sentences, none of them revealing. It's as if his entire, wholly remarkable life is being reduced to a single bad relationship with a painter whose infamy would go on to eclipse his hard-won fame, and that just doesn't do the writer I have come to love any justice whatsoever.

Perhaps the most telling detail of this film is the fact that the only word uttered Spanish rather than its English equivalent is maricón ("faggot"). This has the effect of softening the sting of the word for monolingual English speakers, to the extent that the few overt instances of outright homophobia in the film might go unnoticed. The only exception to this, out of the dozens of times the word is used in the film, is after Lorca has been shot, while the camera is fixed on his still living face, we hear one of the firing squad remark "there's only one way to kill a faggot!" Camera cuts to some wild grasses and we hear another shot ring out, leaving the audience clueless as to what that singular way might be, seeing as he's already been shot once. That this film only vaguely hints at but refuses to depict the poet being "shot twice up the ass for being a fag" as his executioners would go on to brag has been described as "tasteful," but I find it cowardly in exactly the same way as the usage of that slur is throughout the rest of the film - its political correctness keeps us safely one step removed from the brutal, dehumanizing nature of bigotry.

I hope someday a film comes out that gives Lorca his due, with as much fearlessness and scathing irreverence as his own finest works, but Little Ashes isn't it.

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