AMANTES
(Lovers)
Dir. Vicente Aranda, 1991
Spain. 101 min.
In Spain with English subtitles

SATURDAY, JULY 15 – 5:00PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 19 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, JULY 23 - 5:00PM

The year is 1955 and Paco (Jorge Sanz), a young man from a small town, moves to Madrid after being released from military service. While looking for work with the aim of marrying his girlfriend Trini (Maribel Verdú), he takes lodgings in the house of a widow (Victoria Abril), with whom he begins a torrid affair. Fueled by passion, obsession and greed, Paco and Luisa devise a plan to remove Trini from the picture.

Based on a true crime, Aranda sets the film in 1950s Francoist Spain, where repression, political and personal, is the order of the day. For her role as Luisa, the diabolical femme fatale at the center of Amantes, Victoria Abril would win a Golden Bear award for Best Actress in Berlin. The film builds steadily to its unavoidable finale, a heartbreaking and haunting scene of both tragedy and lyrical beauty, as the doomed love triangle breaks under the soft falling of Burgos snow.

“After all the elevated blood pressures regarding Basic Instinct and its allegedly graphic bisexual assignations, it's a pleasure to report that Vicente Aranda's Lovers, a 1991 movie from Spain, has a more palpable sexual charge than Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas could ever manage, is engrossing in a way the American film was not, and - crowning its achievement - is beautifully acted by one brilliant actress, Victoria Abril, and two excellent supporting performers, Jorge Sanz and Maribel Verdu.” -Rafael Navarro, Miami New Times, April 1992

"Vicente Aranda blatantly plays up the virgin/whore dichotomy between the two female characters but the women give nuanced performances that suggest undercurrents of complexity… Luisa (Abril) is a femme fatale of the old school and Abril throws herself wholeheartedly into the bad girl role in a performance that frequently segues between sensuality and a tightly coiled fury (often within the same sex scene).”  -Rebecca Naughton, Eye for Film