After the admirable but suffocating atmosphere of The Intruder, Vicente Aranda's new film is a breath of fresh air. As usual, Aranda's inspiration is a literary work, in this a case written by well-known playwright and novelist Antonio Gala. And again, Aranda's adaptation offers some very personal reflections on the impulses of passion, the theme running through all of his films.
The protagonist of this film is a provincial, middle-class, sexually dissatisfied and inexperienced woman - a typical character in Aranda's personal gallery. Lost in Istanbul, stunned by a place, a culture and a society which are alien to her, she falls for a Turkish man (George Corraface - Salkind's Columbus), and is consumed by a carnal passion which leads her, step by step, towards utter humiliation and submission.
The movie version is not altogether free from Gala's sometimes excessively decorative style. Nevertheless, the vitality of the direction and the powerful narrative drive fashion a picture which, if not Aranda's most rigorous or interesting work, appears to be his most open and commercial film in recent years.
The strong, polished work by Spain's best cinematographer, Jose Luis Alcaine, serves the external beauty of the images and the secret passions they contain equally well . The film's main quality is the absence of any exhibitionist or theoretical pretentions, all its various components well integrated within the story. Carlos F Heredero
Prod co: Lola Films, Cartel, Iberoamericana Films
Prod: Andrés Vincente Gómez
Assoc prods: Manuel Lombadero, Eduardo Campoy
Dir: Vicente Aranda
Scr: Vicente Aranda, based on Antonio Gala's novel
Dir ph: José Luís Alcaine
Ed: Teresa Font
Des: Josep Rosell
Sound: José Nieto
Cast: Ana Belén, George Corraface, Ramón Madaula, Loles León, Silvia Munt, Helio Pedregal, Francis Lorenzo
Running time: 115 mins
