Starting to work on this one really involved going down a rabbit hole much deeper than I intended, and included tracking down three plays and a poem in 3 different languages. The screenplay is kind of ingenious in taking a bunch of different plays by Lorca and making connections between them. They do indeed have some plot similarities. All the same, the tonal shift between the brilliant, farcical and hilarious first half and the romantic, sombre and tragic second half is jarring. This movie is a real emotional roller coaster! Judging from the "5.6" user rating on Kinopoisk, not everyone appreciated that transition and some would have preferred for the film to have ended at the half-way point, before our main hero, Don Cristobal, cuts his own strings (IMDB's rating is a more generous "7.5").

Well, the first half is definitely memorable! It's hard for me not to notice the sheer virtuosity of what Garanina was trying to do with stop motion - all those camera movements, quick cuts, blurred motion, exquisite lighting... and those exquisite puppets! They were made by Lyudmila Soshinskaya, who mainly worked as a sculptor. Her works are on display at some of the most famous Russian galleries and museums.

The second half, meanwhile, reminds me of the slow pace and poetry that would show up later in sections of Garanina's 1988 animated feature The Cat Who Walked By Herself. From a farce, it turns into a surreal dream that speaks in the language of feelings. It does away with most of the details of the plot of the "Don Perlimplin" play it is based on (throwing away the important housekeeper character, for example, or the letters that the young woman received), narrowing the focus only to the emotional relationship between the two main characters. It's a hard thing to get right, though I think Garanina mainly succeeds. On the other hand, it might be too abstract for some.