Ángela Molina arrived as half of one woman in Buñuel's last film and has spent nearly fifty years as the actor a scene settles on without her seeming to ask. The two films we have reviewed give her little; the career gives her plenty.
Fi1m perspective
Molina trained as a dancer before she acted, and the training shows most when she is standing still. Other actors fill a frame by doing something in it. She tends to wait, and let the scene come to her, and the camera, having nowhere else to go, settles. Directors have used that for nearly fifty years, and it is why she turns up so often in the second rank of a cast, playing the woman everyone else is reacting to.
The career starts properly in 1977, two years after her debut in No matarás, when Luis Buñuel cast her as Conchita in That Obscure Object of Desire and then cast Carole Bouquet in the same part, the two of them swapping in and out of one woman without explanation. It was his last film. We were thrown by it the first time, as we were meant to be, and then found we had stopped looking for the join, because Molina's half of Conchita is so plainly a person and not a trick. She has said that "Buñuel rompió las fronteras de mi vida y mi trabajo", and the work that followed bears it out. Through the late 1970s and 1980s she made four films with Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, among them La mitad del cielo (1986), and four with Jaime Chávarri, including Las cosas del querer (1989), in which she plays Pepita, a copla singer, the performance of hers most often recalled.
She worked in Italy and France, twice for Giuseppe Tornatore, and played Beatrix for Ridley Scott in 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992). Then came Pedro Almodóvar, who in Live Flesh (1997) gave her Clara and, with it, the kind of woman she has played since: older, marked by life, not asking for sympathy.
The two films of hers we have reviewed are honest about where she now sits. In Broken Embraces (2009) she is Lena's mother, in a film we found immaculate and cool, and we did not single her out. In Blancanieves (2012) she is Doña Concha, in a film we rated highly, and we did not single her out there either. That is not a complaint. Both parts are built to hold a corner of the picture, and she holds it. But a reader coming from those pages would have no idea what the fuss was about, and there has been fuss.
The reservation, such as it is, concerns what she did not do. She said no to Saura, to Bigas Luna and to Aranda, and a Spanish filmography with those gaps in it looks odd. She is still working, with two films in 2024, The Return and Polvo serán. Start with the Buñuel, which is the only way to understand why everyone kept asking.
Biography
Ángela Molina Tejedor is a Spanish actress. Born in Madrid on 5 October 1955, she is the daughter of singer and actor Antonio Molina. She studied dance and theatre at the Escuela Superior de Madrid and made her film debut in 1975 in César Fernández Ardavín’s No matarás.
She rose to international prominence with her role in Luis Buñuel’s final film That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Her subsequent credits include 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), Live Flesh (1997), Broken Embraces (2009), The Way (2010) and Blancanieves (2012), in which she played Doña Concha. Molina has worked extensively in Italian cinema and received the David di Donatello Award for Best Actress in 1986, becoming the first foreign winner of the prize. In 2021 she was awarded the Goya de Honor for her career.
