User reviews

This film is, for the most part, melodramatic and uninteresting; the characters didn't interest me; the few scenes that might have been good suffered from (I'm assuming) such a constricted budget that the closeups that would have been necessary to give the scenes weight were not filmed. And usually the number of closeups in a movie is not anything that you think of, except that here there's such a conspicuous lack of them that instead of watching the movie you start wondering exactly _how_ small the budget was.

Long takes from one angle are not always a problem; both Ingmar Bergman and Abbas Kiarostami use them to great effect. But for my money, this film ended up looking like a documentary of something possibly not worth documenting.

The film recaptures life in rural Spain during the first years of Franco's dictatorship, around 1942. It represents the difficult relations between those victorious and those who have been vanquished. Furthermore, the movie unveils the black-market economy prevalent during the first decade of the regime, and how the Right-Wing ideologists control the underground economy. They also maintain a repressive society enforcing a set of strict, Catholic morals that they themselves do not practice. Gutiérrez uncovers their hypocrisy and double moral standards through the watchful eyes of the boy-protagonist. Gutiérrez also defeats those values by having the two female protagonists unite and expose the archaic macho culture as repressive and immoral. Juanito, the hope for a tolerant Spain, in the end ascribes a role of power to Angela and Ana. Juan, his father, a devastated Casanova, loses their respect bt trapping himself in gambling and womanizing, and becomes an outlaw. To fully understand this film the viewer must know early Twentieth-Century Spanish history and the two fighting factions in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In this way one can understand Gutiérrez's ironical treatment of post-war relations and how he compels a divided society to look forward to a desired unity.