Madrid, Spain, 1975; shortly after the end of the Franco dictatorship. Six months after the mysterious death of his lover, a prestigious tailor, a married woman visits the office of the young Germán Areta, a former police officer turned private detective, to request his professional services.
Director José Luis Garci has turned his camera inward on filmmakers and screenwriters to portray them as so self-absorbed in the creative process that there is no other world, no other human relationship that can compete. As José (Adolfo Marsillach) and Federico (Jesus Puente) work together on a new screenplay, their interactions with their family (José's teen daughters, Federico's wife) disappear under the all-consuming task of creation. The daughters give up and go off on their own, and the wife joins a convent while Federico barely notices. And when the producer is interrupted by profound grief at the sudden death of his older son, he almost automatically returns to thinking about the film project when the funeral has ended. Garci honors many great directors at the beginning of this film, and the film continues to play out as an elaboration on this homage -- an illustration both of the dedication and the cost of filmmaking, no judgments given.
Film based on the characters of the English writer Arthur Conan Doyle. It tells a hypothetical meeting in Madrid between the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper.
Private detective Germán Areta el Piojo gets a terminally ill client who wishes to see his long lost, runaway daughter before he dies.
Andrés, a dowdy Spaniard, goes to Paris on holiday, hoping to meet a pretty French girl. His wishes may come true after meeting Ninette, his landlord's sensual and possessive young daughter.
A group of nuns find an abandoned baby girl at the doorstep of their convent.
A Nobel prize winner returns to his natal city looking for his home.
Private detective Germán Areta el Piojo investigates the life of a gay man who has apparently abandoned his partner. When they both turn up dead, it seems one killed the other before committing suicide, but Areta is not convinced.
A 50-year-old playwright (Jesus Puente) bemoans his fate from his secluded home in Northern Spain in this depressing drama. Side plots include an actress and former acquaintance who comes to visit and his amorous diversions with a 20-year-old local woman.
The small Asturian village of Cenciella, Spain, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The quiet life of Urbano and Estrella, a kind and naive couple in love, is seriously altered when they get involved in the fierce struggle between the local political factions.
Julia, an only child of an affluent, bank owning family living in Madrid, escapes from her family to get over her grief that her boyfriend has been imprisoned. Julia is a well educated woman, having studied in Switzerland and England, who wants to become a writer. Julia drives to a little village in Asturias called "Corralbos del Sella" and there she stays in a mansion "llendelabarca" of an old childhood friend "Pilara" she had spent many a happy summer with. Also living there is Pilara's mother in law Tia Gala, and her grandson Juanito. Julia's relationship with caretakers, teacher and priest makes Julia, a woman of the spanish capital, perhaps for the first time to not feel so alone.
This movie doesn't have any coherent plot. It's the portrait of the lives of different people in the hard years of post-war in Spain (the 40's), and how they manage to survive in a country desolated by the war. Like other films: La colmena or Roma (Fellini) it shows us lots of characters and some moments of their lives.
A lyrical and nostalgic analysis of how Casablanca, the mythical film directed by Michael Curtiz in 1942, has influenced both film history and pop culture.
