The Unapproachable Woman

In a sun-scorched Andalusian pueblo, where the air is thick with orange-blossom and the whispers of old vendettas, Doña Elvira de Torrijos—played with glacial magnetism by Ángeles Rivas—glides through cobblestone alleys like a black swan that has memorised every crack in the pavement. She is the last of a noble line, custodian of a crumbling palacio whose frescoed ceilings flake like the morals of the townsfolk below. Rumour labels her la mujer inalcanzable: the woman who, after catching her fiancé in the arms of a cigarette girl, locked her heart in an iron reliquary and hurled the key into the Guadalquivir. Yet every dusk, she appears on the balustrade in widow’s lace, staring down at the plaza where Pedro Fernández Cuenca’s matador-turned-revolutionary, Andrés, rehearses speeches that could ignite a republic. The film, a 1942 Spanish oddity shot under the watchful eye of censors, disguises its sulphuric feminism inside the velvet mantle of melodrama. Rey’s camera slithers through wrought-iron grilles, catches candlelight trembling on the blade of a father’s duelling sword, lingers on the pulse beneath Elvira’s ear when the toreador’s voice—hoarse, velvet, dangerous—floats up from the courtyard. Subplots bloom like nightshade: Morales’s consumptive poet sketches Elvira’s profile on tavern napkins then coughs blood onto her likeness; Varillas’s hunchbacked sexton rings the cathedral bell at odd hours, convinced each toll exorcises the lust he harbours for the countess; Comendador’s child-mystic claims the river speaks Elvira’s true name on moonless nights. Mid-film, the narrative fractures into a fever dream: a Holy-Week procession turns into a surreal trial where Elvira, robed in burning scarlet, is dragged by faceless penitents while choirboys chant the names of every man she has refused. She escapes, but the camera stays behind, fixated on the abandoned float—an empty throne of thorns—implying sainthood and ostracism are the same garment viewed from opposing mirrors. In the final act, Andrés scales the palacio wall with a rope of crimson sashes, only to find Elvira waiting with the ancient family harpsichord; she strikes a single chord that detonates the dynamite he has hidden in his jacket pocket. The explosion never arrives—Rey cuts to black, then to the river at dawn: a woman’s black lace mantilla floats like a grieving jellyfish while a child’s voice recites the Hail Mary. Credits roll over the sound of dripping water, leaving viewers to decide whether Elvira finally surrendered her key, or whether the river itself has become the unapproachable woman.