Titans of Spanish cinema director Vicente Aranda and actress Victoria Abril made 13 films together over the course of 40 years. This summer, Spectacle presents two of their steamiest noirs, Amantes and Intruso.
Both based on true crimes, Amantes and Intruso explore a frequent theme in the director’s work: the destructive potential of passion. Cool exteriors conceal seething desire. Repression breeds obsession. Obsession leads to death in two stories of doomed love triangles.
AMANTES
(Lovers)
Dir. Vicente Aranda, 1991
Spain. 101 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles
GET TICKETS
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
INTRUSO
(Intruder)
Dir. Vicente Aranda, 1993
Spain. 85 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles
GET TICKETS
WEDNESDAY JULY 5 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY JULY 22 – 5:00PM
SUNDAY JULY 30 – 5:00PM
Luisa (Victoria Abril) spots her ex-husband, Angel (Arias), wandering about the city in complete destitution. She takes him into her house, where she lives with her present husband, Ramiro (Antonio Valero), a doctor, and two small children. Once ensconced in the house, the terminally ill Angel decides to wreak vengeance on Ramiro by reclaiming his ex-wife. -Variety
An underseen follow up to Amantes, Aranda returns to similar thematic and narrative territory with Intruso, a story of a woman torn between two husbands, in the gray and rainy setting of contemporary Santander. The cold winter light penetrates the family’s domestic enclave, and Director of Photography José Luis Alcaine renders the most intimate and intense interior scenes with steely brilliance and deep shadows. Abril is captivating again. Less a master manipulator and ace seductress than in Amantes, here she is the one possessed and obsessed, swept up in a past love re-emerged, in buried feelings reanimated, her performance brims over with desire, escaping her in tears and whispers.
“The twisted plotline highlights a sicko possessive love that makes one squirm, but not from anything that’s edifying. It’s just a squirmy pic.” – Dennis Schwartz, Dennis Schwartz Movies Reviews
“If this movie had been directed by Lars Von Trier, it would now be one of the jewels in the crown of his early filmography, but no, it is directed by an absolutely captivating, uncomfortable, risk-taking and sinister Vicente Aranda.” -Alex Caballero, Letterboxd