Plumbing New Territory With Carlos Saura : Movies: ‘Ay, Carmela!’ may reassert the great Spanish filmmaker in Western eyes. The lusty tale is set during a period Spanish filmmakers have largely ignored for more than half a century: the civil war of the late ‘30s.

His hair is long and gray, his face is calm and ironic, his clothes elegant but casual. His demeanor vaguely suggests a Spanish patrician who’s decided to chuck it all and take up a late-blooming career as a music impresario or avant-garde novelist.

Yet Carlos Saura, director of the tragicomedy “Ay, Carmela!,” in which a flamboyant traveling show troupe accidentally becomes a symbol of defiance to tyranny, is something else: the most internationally honored and admired of all living Spanish filmmakers.

Pedro Almodovar, master of sexy comic camp and director of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” may be the current darling of critics and art-house audiences. But it is Saura who has built up, steadily, the most impressive oeuvre of any living Spanish director: winning many international awards and creating a canon that embraces psychological drama (“La Caza,” “Sweet Hours”), corrosive political satire (“The Garden of Delights,” “Ana and the Wolves”), thrillers (“Peppermint Frappe”), musicals (the Antonio Gades’ trilogy), zany comedy (“Mama Turns 100”), realistic low-life studies (“Los Golfos”) and dreamlike dramas, steeped in a reverie unique to Saura (“Elisa, Mia Vida,” “Cria Cuervos”).

Right now, the Gades’ dance movies are probably the most familiar to American moviegoers: the trilogy of movies starring and choreographed by lithe, hatchet-jawed Antonio Gades and featuring his great Flamenco troupe. The series began with “Blood Wedding” in 1981, and continues through 1983’s “Carmen” and 1985’s “El Amor Brujo.”

“Ay, Carmela!” may reassert Saura in Western eyes. This lusty, funny, poignant tale, based on a hit two-character play, is set during a period Spanish filmmakers have largely ignored for more than half a century: the civil war of the late ‘30s, a conflict that provided an eerie preview of World War II and thrust Francisco Franco into power for the next three decades.

“One amazing thing,” Saura recalls. “It was common thinking in Spain to say that the civil war held no interest for the public--but, in fact, ‘Ay, Carmela!’ was quite commercially successful there. And, in countries like Argentina, the audience would actually split up into two factions: one rooting for the Fascists, one for Carmela and the POWs.”

Saura’s own family was split as well. During the war, his father was secretary to the Minister of Finance for the Republican Government, yet his mother’s relations were all solidly pro-Franco. “They were Fascists. So, at the end of the war, my father sent me to live with my grandmother in Aragon to keep me safe. They were very tender to me, wonderful people, but they were my enemies. They kept trying to convince me that the government that was killing my people was in the right.”

One of the most seemingly fearless of all Spanish left-wing filmmakers, Saura turned out--with remarkable impunity during Franco’s regime--numerous films critical of what he regarded as freedom’s three great enemies: “The Three Big Monsters” as he calls them, “The Church, the Military and the lack of sexual freedom.” But, though “Ay, Carmela!” is an unflinchingly political statement, it’s not an insistent one.

The movie, a Spanish-Italian co-production, in which the villains are Mussolini’s troops, has a tone and style that suggests the Italian comedies of Fellini, Mario Monicelli and Dino Risi--just as Carmen Maura’s Carmela suggests earthy, fiery Anna Magnani, and her cowardly consort, Andres Pajares’ Paulino, resembles Italian comic Alberto Sordi. “I never make a purely political film, a ‘First Degree’ political film, as the French say. There are politics in my pictures, but not exclusively. I also talk about the family structure, psychological and sexual attitudes and intimate relationships.”

How did Saura get away with his defiant anti-Establishment posture in the years from 1959 to Franco’s fall? Through subtlety and one of the qualities he prizes most: irony.

“I was trying to make my films with pure integrity, ignoring the Fascists and the censorship. . . . Not because I’m a hero, but because I just believed the only way to do something good was to do something you’re committed to, that you really like. So my producers, especially Elias (Querejeta), fought the bureaucratic battles.

“There are two steps in the censorship process. Presenting the project . . . and presenting the final product for approval. Elias was very smart. I wrote whatever I wanted, and then he would rewrite it for the censors. Then I would go back to the original script. . . . When the film was complete, the battle with the censorship board was much easier. Sometimes the censors, looking at scripts, would start reading things that were totally in their minds, and not on the paper.”

Two other factors protected Saura. First: his growing international prestige, beginning with two Berlin Festival Silver Bears, in 1968 for “Peppermint Frappe” and in 1966 for “La Caza.” “La Caza” is a film regarded by many of his colleagues, including Manuel Gutierrez Aragon (“Half of Heaven”), as the major turning point in modern Spanish cinema.

And also, perhaps, his long-time marriage to actress Geraldine Chaplin, who starred in many of his films of the late ‘60s and ‘70s. Chaplin became, for him, a shining, flower-like symbol of the fragility or resilience of beauty in a climate of oppression. Both helped. In 1970, when the censors banned his nightmarish political and social satire, “The Garden of Delights” Querejeta simply sent the film to the New York Film Festival, where enough success and prestige was generated to make the censors back down.

“I was trying to make my films with a more pure integrity,” Saura says. “Not to think about censorship or Fascists. . . . Not because I’m a hero, or anything like that. I just believed that the only way to do something good is to do something you’re committed to, that you really like.”