Nueve cartas a Berta

Quote:
Lorenzo, a student at Salamanca in the late 1950s, has just spent a summer in England where he has discovered new ways of life and other horizons as well as meeting and falling in love Berta, the daughter of an exile who has never seen Spain. Upon his return, the traditional atmosphere of his family, routine relations with his friends and his girlfriend, and the tedium of life in the city become more and more overwhelming. He writes to his idealized Berta, still living in England, in a series of letters to try to convey to her what life is like in Spain and his desire to leave his provincial family behind and discover life on his own. Although the lure to break free is foremost on his mind, he decides to marry a young woman from a similar background to live the life of a country squire. However, a trip to Madrid opens up other possibilities.

This is widely regarded as a key film of the New Spanish Cinema for its fairly overt critique of Franco’s Spain as a backward, provincial, and isolated society and for its use of freeze frames and “staggered” slow motion imagery which reinforces the epistolary form (also dignified with visual allusions to great medieval exemplars of the form) and the “time out of joint” theme.