Benjamín's Wife

Benjamín is past middle age, has never married, and lives with his sister in a small Mexican town. He falls in love with young Natividad, who works in the shop opposite. He writes her letters and gets nothing back. In the end he carries out an idea one of the town's young men came up with: he abducts her. But once he has done it he does not know what to do, and the girl behaves in a way nobody expects. It is Carlos Carrera's first feature. The mould is provincial comedy but the material is uncomfortable, and the film knows it: the abduction here is not a romantic gesture but a coercion the town treats as normal, and the story does not make it charming. The humour comes out of exactly that tension. Ninety minutes. The film won a number of awards in Mexico that year and made Carrera's name.