For their third B. Traven adaptation together, Roberto Gavaldón and lead Ignacio López Tarso recruited the frequent Luis Buñuel scenarist Julio Alejandro to craft this unsettling, surrealist-tinged melodrama with a certain Hitchcockian fondness for double lives. Pina Pellicer (Macario, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, One Eyed Jacks) stars as Luisa, a young woman from the countryside, who travels to the capital and goes to work for Albino (Tarso), the widowed owner of a candy shop. Her new employer soon develops a fondness for Luisa, who insists—to everyone around her—that within weeks she’ll be marrying her boyfriend Carlos, a driver for a wealthy family. Yet something seems amiss: Carlos never shows up to spend Christmas Eve with Luisa, and furthermore forgets to give her a present. Her wedding day finally comes, and Luisa heads off to the church, and waits… and waits. Gavaldón here looks at the new, middle-class culture then spreading rapidly in urban Mexico, exposing how appearances too often replace any real substance in even the most intimate relations.

Courtesy of Filmoteca UNAM’s collection. Televisa, S. de R.L. de C.V. All Rights Reserved. We appreciate the support of Fundación Televisa.

“…delicious psycho/melodrama with a near perfect script. pina pellicer played the hell out of luisa!” – Beatrix, letterboxd

“…honestly, one of the best classical Mexican films I think I’ve seen. The story is creepily fantastic. The movie could’ve been played for high camp. But its genius is that Gavaldon and the lead actress Pina Pellicer (who’s fantastic) play the whole thing deadly seriously. And that tension between classy seriousness and batshit crazy melodrama was fantastic.” Doug Dibbern, letterboxd

“Pina Pellicer’s eyes were fashioned by God for this role: angled downward at their outer corners, pleading for love with terror at the thought of ever accepting it in total earnest.” – Marisol, letterboxd

“You wont believe the lies this girl gets herself into!” ADHDSoundSystem, letterboxd