Lovers (film) - Production

Production

Amantes had its origin in La Huella del Crimen (The trace of the crime), a Spanish TV series depicting infamous crimes which happened in Spain, for which Vicente Aranda had directed the chapter El Crimen del Capitán Sánchez (Captain Sánchez's Crime) in 1984. The success of this production, made for TVE, compelled Producer Pedro Costa to develop a second part. 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 the 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 crime concerned a widow, Francisca Sánchez Morales, engaged in blackmailing who persuaded a young man, José García San Juan, to kill his young wife. Three days later, the couple was 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 reinterpretation of the crime was built up during the pre-production of Los Amantes de Tetuán. The script was written by Alvaro del Amo, Carlos Perez Merinero and Vicente Aranda using some elements of the actual crime and reinventing many others to recreate the background of the characters about which little was known. The TV 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 miniseries for TVE. By then, Aranda was initially reluctant to make another production for TV 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 miseries for TV 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 '50s for both economic and dramatic reasons. It was cheaper to recreate the period of the '50s and Vicente Aranda considered the '50s more appealing for modern audiences. The real life crime story was treated in the same way Billy Wilder did with the facts that inspired James M. Cain's novel Double Indemnity. Bigas Luna’s Las Edades de Lulu, a movie 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. Vicente Aranda explains:

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, Pedro Costa, explained at 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 an elegiac and sad one. The score was composed by Jose Nieto, often working with Aranda (Intruso, Celos, Juana la Loca, Carmen) and the film editor was Aranda’s regular, his wife, Teresa Font. Equally noteworthy is the film’s striking cinematography by Jose 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 combey the somber qualities of urban life during the early years of Franco’s dictatorship.