Lovers: A True Story

Lovers: A True Story (1991)

Amantes

This landlady has more than just rent on her mind

A torrid affair between a recently discharged serviceman and an attractive widow leads to murder.

Date of release
1991-02-23
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (69)
Runtime
1h 43m
Genres
Crime, Drama, Romance
Director
Vicente Aranda

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Madrid

Lovers is a 1991 Spanish film noir written and directed by Vicente Aranda, starring Victoria Abril, Jorge Sanz and Maribel Verdú. The film brought Aranda to widespread attention in the English-speaking world. It won two Goya Awards and is considered one of the best Spanish films of the 1990s.

Production and background

Amantes had its origin in La huella del crimen, a Spanish anthology television series depicting infamous crimes that happened in Spain, and for which Vicente Aranda had directed the episode Captain Sánchez's Crime in 1984. The success of this production, made for Televisión Española (TVE), compelled producer Pedro Costa to develop a follow-up.

The event itself concerned a widow, Francisca Sánchez Morales, engaged in blackmailing and who persuaded a young man, José García San Juan, to kill his young wife, Dominga del Pino Rodríguez. Three days later, the couple were caught and never saw each other again. They were condemned to capital punishment, still prevailing by those years in Spain (not even their attorney wanted to defend them).

A re-interpretation of the crime was built up during the pre-production of Los Amantes de Tetuán. The script was written by Aranda, Alvaro del Amo, and Carlos Perez Merinero, using some elements of the actual crime and reinventing many others to recreate the background of the characters, about which little was known.

The original title, Los Amantes de Tetuán, was shortened to simply Amantes to avoid confusion with the North African city of the same name. The events were moved from the 1940s to an unspecific time in the 1950s. for both economic and dramatic reasons. It was cheaper to recreate the period of the 1950s, and Aranda considered the decade more appealing for modern audiences.

The most famous sequence of the film in which Luisa introduces a handkerchief in Paco’s anus, to withdraw it in the moment of climax, was not in the script. Aranda explained:

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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