Lovers

Lovers - 2003-09-21 Director: Vicente Aranda Spain, 1992, Color, 103 minutes The film is overtly sexual and attempts to challenge many conventional social taboos. It is a distinctly Spanish interpretation of the romantic relationship between a man and a woman, styled after Buñuel's black comedies, and merges it with a thick melodrama, resulting in a hard-to-watch yet entertaining film that gives it a unique quality. The story, set in the 1950s during Franco's brutal dictatorship, recounts the life of a handsome young man named 'Paco' who is pursued by two women competing for his affection: one is his virgin and noble fiancée named 'Trini', who loves Paco with pure and innocent affection, and the other is 'Luisa', Paco's landlady who introduces him to the world of sex and crime. The duality that Paco faces is, in fact, a chronic duality of the Western world that is evident throughout Western literature: the duality of the concept of woman in the virgin/whore dichotomy, or innocent/immoral, which has found its ideal form within the extremely patriarchal Spanish culture. However, for the young Paco, the situation is a realization of a dream that he himself can hardly believe. The film's narrative is structured in such a way that the early scenes of sex and sharp dialogue quickly transform into a fierce competition between the two jealous women. Soon, this fierce rivalry takes on dangerous dimensions as Luisa, on one hand, is connected with gangsters and, on the other hand, explicitly asks Paco to eliminate Trini and seize her money, all while Trini innocently relies on her virtue and virginity.