This is a curious and little-known film from Saura’s best period. Co-scripted by Rafael Azcona, the film is virtually a two-hander about a husband and wife (Per Oscarsson and Geraldine Chaplin) discovering role playing to supplement their apparently repressed sex life and going a little bit too far. There is a shade of Virginia Woolf here, and more than a shade of the later Buñuel (who learned most of his tricks from Azcona, anyway). However, what Buñuel does with a sledge-hammer and schoolboy glee, Saura does with subtlety and bitter irony. Continue reading →

Plot
While attending an international conference which seeks to reduce the incidence of the use of torture by nations around the globe, a movie director (Jose Luis Gomez) encounters a woman (Geraldine Chaplin) whom he decides to cast in a play about state torture. As events proceed, he and the woman, the wife of a dentist, become lovers. All along, however, right-wing types have been persecuting, and the whole endeavor goes sour. Continue reading →

The young but traveled Ana arrives in a manor in the countryside of Spain to work as nanny of three girls and finds a dysfunctional family: the matriarch is a sick old woman obsessed by death and having constant nervous breakdown; her son José was raised dressing girl’s clothes until his First Communion and is obsessed by military clothes and stuffs; Juan, the father of the three girls, is a pervert since his childhood that writes pornographic letters to Ana; his wife Luchy has suicidal tendencies; and the mystic and religious eremite Fernando, who was inflicted to flagellation in his childhood, lives recluse in a cave. The presence of Ana disturbs the three brothers with tragic consequences. Continue reading →