Don Alejandro is a courtly, quixotic figure on a white steed, stigmatised as 'eccentric' for daring, at sixty, to harbour sexual desires. 13-year-old Goyita (
Ana Torrent
from Spirit of the Beehive), first seen as a school-play Lady Macbeth, is a sensual child-woman but no simple Hispanic Lolita, for she lives literally in the shadow of the law at the station of the local Guarda Civil. The story tells of their chaste but erotic love, with nothing of the whimsical or lubricious: it's the 'tragic show' of stifled dreams, illicit longings, acted out intricately by all the characters, male and female, old and young, and interwoven with a dense web of symbolic allusions - suggestively haunting bird imagery, exultant use of music (Haydn's Creation) and the Macbeth motif that ominously mirrors the main plot. A film of infinite tenderness, lyricism and passion.