The love triangle played by stereotyped performers (a ravishing brunette leading lady, a soap-opera hunk with long hair and a beard of several days, and a tall man wearing glasses to make him look a little ugly) is accompanied by phallic signs everywhere, crystals, bad wigs, wild horses, postcard landscapes, apparitions, compositions of artsy photographs, a somewhat ridiculous climax with the hunk displaying his bare ass as he duels wearing only a shirt, a few dances and to top it all a silly little song in English for the closing credits. Federico García Lorca must turn in his grave, as the saying goes, every time somebody projects "La novia" and that theme resonates in English, considering that it is a rereading of Lorca's "Blood Wedding", a play graced with his diaphanous verses in crystalline and musical Spanish. The Spanish-German co-production was filmed in several places (including Zaragoza and Turkey) to tell us once again this story of passions, false honor and machismo, the type of machismo that turns people mad and kills. In all of this, to my taste Luisa Gavasa (of course, awarded a Goya as best supporting actress) is the best thing, as a landowner and matriarch, a hurt avenger, a castrating mother, the mother queen of all the femi-Nazis in the world. In any case, different strokes for different folks, but surely not mine.
