A Virgin's Fury

La Tfa Tula, feelingly adapted from a novel by Spain's passionate Writer-Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (who died in 1936), is an austere and chilling portrait of virginity Castilian-style.

Sexually repressed, still beautiful and inflexibly virtuous, Tula (Aurora Bautista) becomes a spinsterish "Aunt Tula" to her dead sister's small son and daughter. As decreed by custom in a stifling provincial town, she takes the bereft children and her handsome brother-in-law Ramiro (Carlos Estrada) under her roof. She rejects another suitor to fulfill what she sees as her duty, but cannot admit that Ramiro attracts her. Secretly she pores, moist-lipped and breathless, over a packet of impulsive love letters he wrote to her sister years earlier, yet is offended when the man himself appears in his undershirt looking flagrantly virile. When Ramiro proposes to her, she spurns his suggestion as "distasteful." When he rashly tries to force himself upon her one morning, she flees to her confessor, a plain-spoken priest who advises Tula to stop being proud and foolish: "You do his laundry, you make his bed. It's only natural that he wants to marry you."

The dry, aching spinster realizes too late that a Spaniard's flesh-and-blood instincts are his surest defense against omnipresent death. Ready at last to welcome Ramiro's attentions, Tula learns that during a holiday visit to a neighboring village, he seduced her nubile cousin and now must marry the girl. She turns on Ramiro in black Spanish fury, maddened for the moment by the realization that unyielding virtue has robbed her of love, husband, children and all.

Director Miguel Picazo, in a first film blessed with faultless performances, heightens his effects with taste and economy and masterfully uncovers the cruelty buried under centuries-old layers of Spanish folkways. The best of this sober sex drama catches every nuance of self-denial in the shock of an unexpected word or gesture; the giddy, slightly drunken release of inhibitions among women at a bridal shower; the total revelation of loneliness and hunger in the eyes of a widower who paces through a long empty night, his imagination inflamed by a last light flickering out in the house across the way.

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