True story, mid-19th-century, about an upper-class Argentine debutante who runs off with a priest. After the tough-talking historical prologue, the misty soft-focus photography might be seen as ironic, but this is an interpretation harder to maintain when things get around to the remarkably smooth passion-consummation in a jouncing horse-drawn coach. And whether ironic or otherwise, the fogged-glasses effect is difficult to see as anything but a form of aloofness from characters submersed in history. Reinforcing this, the movie takes inordinate pleasure, or pain, or both, in rehearsing the benighted views of the past: "Remember that a woman can be the devil's tool," "A single woman is a disorder of nature," and so on. Tongue-cluckers can have a field day. With Susu Pecoraro and Imanol Arias; directed by Maria Luisa Bemberg. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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