El Dorado

El Dorado
DVD cover
Directed by	Carlos Saura
Produced by	Andrés Vicente Gómez
Written by	Carlos Saura
Starring	Omero Antonutti Lambert Wilson Inés Sastre Eusebio Poncela
Music by	Alejandro Massó
Cinematography	Teodoro Escamilla
Editing by	Pedro del Rey
Release date(s)	20 April 1988
Running time	149 minutes
Country	Spain
Language	Spanish

El Dorado is a 1988 Spanish film written and directed by Carlos Saura. It was entered into the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.^[1]

Synopsis

The film is about an expedition down the Orinoco and Amazon rivers in 1560 by Spanish soldiers searching for the fabled city of gold, El Dorado. Taking some followers and family along on the journey, they descend into madness and end up dying from the environment and each other.

Cast

• Omero Antonutti - Aguirre
• Lambert Wilson - Ursúa
• Eusebio Poncela - Guzmán
• Gabriela Roel - Inés
• Inés Sastre - Elvira
• José Sancho - La Bandera
• Patxi Bisquert - Pedrarías
• Francisco Algora - LLamoso
• Féodor Atkine - Montoya
• Abel Vitón - Henao
• Francisco Merino - Alonso Esteban
• Mariano González - Zalduendo
• Gladys Catania - Juana
• Alfredo Catania - Vargas
• Gustavo Rojas - Carrión

Critique

The film is 142 minutes long, and has been criticized for its plodding plot, with brief moments of action where the travellers must survive the crises of jungle life and human frailty. Filmed on location in South America, the river and jungle scenery dominate the characters, who are over-dressed for the heat in their old world clothes and armour.

The protagonist, Lope de Aguirre, is played by Omero Antonutti, who plays an actual historical character with quiet, understated menace. Directed by the award-winning Carlos Saura (who also wrote the screenplay), the film was made just a few years after the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Thus the search for political themes and symbols is mandatory for all.

Because of a similarity in plot and characters, the movie suffers by comparison with 1972's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but stands on its own as a less fantastic version of the same journey of obsessed explorers.

References

External links

• El Dorado at the Internet Movie Database

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