Antonio, a rich businessman with a flash American car, drives his glamorous wife Teresa (whose blonde hairdo we learn later is not real) and their best friend Fernando from Madrid to the rocky coast near Almería. Tension is in the air from the start.
Antonio has succeeded in his job but not in his marriage, for Teresa is bored and all too open to the gallantries of Fernando. The thought that she might already have rejected him and chosen another torments Antonio, with his jealousy interpreting every rebuff to him and every favour to the other as evidence of incipient or actual adultery. By the end, when the three have reached a deserted beach, we are not sure how much of what we see is only in Antonio's tortured mind, which has turned to thoughts of murder.
Visually, the black-and-white film shows the arid empty expanses of rural Spain with few buildings or humans, concentrating on the intense cross-currents between the three principals but also making them mere figures in a timeless landscape.
Though their drama is indeed ancient and universal, it is also local and contemporary. Antonio is one of the new rich under Franco, an apparently apolitical and agnostic technocrat who has adopted Western ways (he likes trail bikes and aqualunging). In a neat symbol of new versus old, his overlong car can barely traverse the medieval streets of a village they enter. Yet his veneer of affluent modernity crumbles when confronted with the ultimate challenge to innate Hispanic machismo, a wife who may be unfaithful and her potential lover. Fernando seems equally trapped in his genetic heritage.
Teresa, not played by a Spaniard, is a more modern woman, considering herself free from unquestioning obedience to a patriarchal husband and free to accept advances from another. Geraldine Chaplin shines as first of all the trophy wife, tired of her husband's obsessive attention, who hides behind sunglasses, make-up and peroxide wig. When she gets down to the beach and into a plain black bikini, a different woman appears who is young and intensely alive, with short dark hair and scrubbed laughing face. Finding a footless black stocking in the sand, she puts it on one leg to look like some fetishist's dark fantasy.
We travel part of the way with the trio on their journey, but are left to imagine the outcome. A human triangle acted out in isolation under the unfeeling eye of nature is of course reminiscent of two earlier works by Polanski, "Knife in the Water" and "Cul-de-sac". The unsettling wife in the latter was also named Teresa.
Antonio has succeeded in his job but not in his marriage, for Teresa is bored and all too open to the gallantries of Fernando. The thought that she might already have rejected him and chosen another torments Antonio, with his jealousy interpreting every rebuff to him and every favour to the other as evidence of incipient or actual adultery. By the end, when the three have reached a deserted beach, we are not sure how much of what we see is only in Antonio's tortured mind, which has turned to thoughts of murder.
Visually, the black-and-white film shows the arid empty expanses of rural Spain with few buildings or humans, concentrating on the intense cross-currents between the three principals but also making them mere figures in a timeless landscape.
Though their drama is indeed ancient and universal, it is also local and contemporary. Antonio is one of the new rich under Franco, an apparently apolitical and agnostic technocrat who has adopted Western ways (he likes trail bikes and aqualunging). In a neat symbol of new versus old, his overlong car can barely traverse the medieval streets of a village they enter. Yet his veneer of affluent modernity crumbles when confronted with the ultimate challenge to innate Hispanic machismo, a wife who may be unfaithful and her potential lover. Fernando seems equally trapped in his genetic heritage.
Teresa, not played by a Spaniard, is a more modern woman, considering herself free from unquestioning obedience to a patriarchal husband and free to accept advances from another. Geraldine Chaplin shines as first of all the trophy wife, tired of her husband's obsessive attention, who hides behind sunglasses, make-up and peroxide wig. When she gets down to the beach and into a plain black bikini, a different woman appears who is young and intensely alive, with short dark hair and scrubbed laughing face. Finding a footless black stocking in the sand, she puts it on one leg to look like some fetishist's dark fantasy.
We travel part of the way with the trio on their journey, but are left to imagine the outcome. A human triangle acted out in isolation under the unfeeling eye of nature is of course reminiscent of two earlier works by Polanski, "Knife in the Water" and "Cul-de-sac". The unsettling wife in the latter was also named Teresa.