Vincente Aranda’s newfilm is a melodrama, finely balanced and controlled, immaculately performed and executed. Set in the fifties, Aranda’s film focuses an ironic microsscope on certain elements of Franco’s Spain, exposing a set of immoralities that propel the film towards its inevitable destiny.
Paco has plans to marry the dark simmering Trini, but when he finds himself a room in part of an apartment belonging to a pretty widow, the blond and passionate Luisa (given a performance of sultry smokiness by Victoria Abril) it is not long before Paco finds himself in Luisa’s passionate embrace.
In an absence of anything approaching morality, Aranda provides us with a devestating portrait of a Spain in which all values have simply disappeared.
Lovers is not only a study in sexual obsession, male spinelessness, and the corruption of innocence, it also takes aim at an entire set of values which dominated Spain during its recent dark ages.