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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. In the new installment of the series, there was to be an episode called Los Amantes de Tetuán (The Lovers of Tetuán), the story of a real life crime committed by a couple living in the district of Tetuán de las Victorias, a working class sector of Madrid. The actual crime took place in 1949 in La Canal, a small village near Burgos, and so it was also dubbed as 'El Crimen de La Canal' ('Crime at La Canal').

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). Eventually, they got their sentences commuted and they served between ten and twelve years. The widow died of a heart attack just after leaving jail, and the young man started a new, anonymous and prosperous life in Zaragoza.

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 television project was halted from 1987 to 1990, and when the time came to start production, Los Amantes de Tetuán took a separate life from La Huella del Crimen. It was going to be the last chapter to be filmed because Vicente Aranda was immersed in the making of a mini-series for TVE. By then, Aranda was initially reluctant to make another production for television, and proposed to expand the script and make it into a full feature film for the big screen. Thanks to the recent success of his television mini-series, Los Jinetes del Alba, the project was approved by TVE.

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 real life crime story was treated in the same way Billy Wilder used the facts that inspired his adaptation of Double Indemnity, the novel by James M. Cain. Las Edades de Lulu, a movie directed by Bigas Luna and which had been seen by Aranda, inspired the eroticism of the film.

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:

I told the actors that I felt something was lacking and that we needed something more explicit, a novelty. I opened a kind of contest and each one gave different options. Jorge Sanz came out with the idea of the handkerchief. The production was successful team collaboration. From the beginning at the preparation of the film, there was a spirit of team collaboration, something very positive that made our work fun. I don’t know why, but we all knew we were making a film that was going to be important.

The intense and tragic climax was benefited by the weather, with a snowstorm that was not scheduled at all for the shooting, as producer Costa explained through the DVD commentaries. That scene, filmed in front of the famous Burgos Cathedral, was articulated around two popular Spanish Christmas carols, Dime, Niño, de Quién Eres and La Marimorena, whose traditional cheerful melody, by contrast, is changed for the score into one that is elegiac and sad. The score was composed by Jose Nieto, often working with Aranda (Intruso, Celos, Juana la Loca and Carmen) and the film editor was Aranda’s regular, his wife Teresa Font. Equally noteworthy is the film’s striking cinematography by José Luis Alcaine, with whom Aranda had previously worked on no fewer than five films. Alcaine is especially adept at evoking the 'sooty' look of Madrid winters, which convey the somber qualities of urban life during the early years of Francoist Spain.

Analysis

In Amantes, Aranda focuses tightly on his three leading actors, effectively conveying the dreadful, consuming power of passion. The films portrays a mortal struggle between a strong phallic widow and a younger patriarchal woman for the love of a young man in a romantic love triangle. The widow derives her power from an intense sexuality and the religious idealism belongs to the young victim. Set in film noir genre, it depicts the young man, Paco, not as the master of the two women who love him, but as the malleable object of their competing scenarios. Luisa is introduced with a mouthful of candy, and draped with Christmas tinsel, almost as though she were a gift to the sexually frustrated Paco. Aranda thus sets up his central conflict with precision and power. Despite the physical beauty of the two women, it is the handsome young man who is treated as the primary object of desire. He is seduced by both women and is the object of the camera's erotic gaze. He embodies the 1950s generation torn between 'two Spains', represented by the two female rivals. Identified with the images of rural Spain, Trini is the traditionally stoically self-sacrificing embodiment of Catholic Spain, versus the modern vision of a newly emerging industrialized Spain, incarnated in Luisa, who is identified with the city and with the iconography of foreign culture (kimono, Christmas tree ornaments), representing the modernizing version of Spain. Though the narrative eventually cast Luisa as the heartless instigator of Trini's murder, she can also be perceived as a rebel against the oppression of a macho culture while Paco, a traditional tragic film noir hero, is turned into a murderer by the two women who love him.

Despite being positioned as the opposing stereotypes of virgin and whore, Trini and Luisa are equally passionate and strong willed. Both are frequently robed in blue, a color feature in traditional pictorial representations of the virgin, and Trini takes with her a painting of the Immaculate Conception, hanging it in the hotel room just before her death. While Luisa directs her violent passions outwards, confessing to Paco that she murdered her husband, Trini turns them inwards on herself, following in the footsteps of her lame mother, who threw herself in front of a cart after learning of her husband's infidelity. Just as Luisa forced Paco to take hold of his penis in their pursuits of pleasure, Trini coerces him to wield the razor that will release her from pain.

The sexual scenes of the film are designed to underscore the female domination of the male, even in terms of his sexual identity. Amantes forcefully depicts the subversive power of Luisa's sexuality. From the moment she opens the door to Paco, wearing a colorful dark blue robe and draped with glittering streamers she is using to decorate a Christmas tree, Luisa appears as a profane alternative to the Madonna. Her body substitutes for the Christmas tree and all of its religious symbolism, offering eroticism in place of religious ecstasy. Not only is she the sexual subject who actively pursues her own desire and who first seduces Paco, but she continues to control the love-making. In a graphic sex scene, we see her penetrating his anus with a silk handkerchief and then withdrawing it in the moments of ecstasy. Despite her sexually dominating her young lover, Luisa remains loving and emotionally vulnerable. Paco's response not only makes him obsessed, but he rejects the more traditional passive sexuality of his fiancéé Trini.

The murder scene is remarkable for its under-stated approach. Staged on a bench in front of the cathedral of Burgos (the small town of Aranda de Duero, in the film), the murder retains the aura of Christian ritual, especially since the minimalist representation of violence is limited to a few close-ups of the victim's barefoot and a few drops of bright red blood falling on the pure white snow. Earlier, Paco had sat on the same bench praying, observed by a beautiful young mother who was carrying a bright blue umbrella and tying the shoelace of her young son, a symbolic Madonna who seems to foresee the murder.

In the final scene, Paco goes to the train station to find Luisa. Pressing his bloody hands against the window, he draws her off the train for a final murderous embrace, a shot that is held, then blurs and finally freezes, signifying the triumph of their passion. A printed epilogue delivers the ironic moralizing punch line to the narrative. Three days later, Paco and Luisa were arrested in Valladolid (a city well known for its right-wing sentiments) and they never saw each other again.