Filmed in glamorous black and white, all dialogue furnished via intertitles, the movie is less a pastiche than The Artist and, at least initially, it's not as precious.

The pleasure resides as much in the layers upon layers of references to film history, to Spanish history, to fairytales, to Hollywood entertainment, as it does in its story of a little girl who loses everything.

It's like watching a gorgeous tragi-comic opera written by Dickens and co-directed by Fellini and Almodovar.

It works decently when it adopts the formal properties of silent film, but I have the feeling that it is a dark fable adorned with facileness and that it lacks emotion in its folkloric notes on Spanish culture. [Full review in Spanish]