On DVD: "Blancanieves"

In 2003's amusing Torremolinos 73, his first film to hit UK screens, the Spanish director Pablo Berger had fun recreating the early days of Super 8-shot amateur pornography. For his next trick, Blancanieves, Berger has reached further back into movie history, for a film that suggests what an Iberian version of Snow White would have looked and sounded like around the time of Blood and Sand (the Valentino version, not the Sharon Stone version): silent, black-and-white, 4:3 with intertitles, and centred on a heroine who's both the daughter of a successful bullfighter - thus more likely than most to attract wicked stepmothers - and an enthusiastic flamenco dancer in those moments where she isn't being oppressed, persecuted or poisoned.

The unavoidable reference point would be The Artist, but Berger has restored the mud, melancholy and kinkiness that that earlier crowdpleaser couldn't quite bring itself to acknowledge also existed within the realms of the silent cinema. At one point, the camera alights on a calendar bearing a Russian proverb ("pursuing that which has passed is like chasing the wind") that sounds almost like auto-critique; it will eventually arrive, altogether unhappily, upon a row of would-be suitors lining up to kiss our unconscious heroine (Macarena Gomez) in a travelling freakshow that may just be a comment on how the Snow White story has been increasingly removed from its Grimm origins, whether Disneyfied or otherwise commercialised.

If that sounds overly glum, well, just wait until you see the bullfighting dwarfs (yes, there's a grumpy one), and Berger works those effects that remain available to him hard indeed. Among a set of supremely expressive performances, Gomez proves at least as winning as the Dujardin-Bejo pairing, and eternal screen siren Maribel Verdú (Y Tu Mama Tambien), her face newly mask-like, is intensely spooky in the stepmother role. The sound and montage going on around them is so busy and engaged as to make every other film on release seem terribly lazy, and the contrast Berger finds in the blacks and whites of his image - particularly within the vast frame of the bullfighting arena, aided by the kind of hi-def digital equipment that wasn't available to his 1929 equivalents - is frequently just breathtaking.

Blancanieves is available on DVD through StudioCanal.