Main Street

A provincial town in Spain, autumn 1955. Isabel is thirty five and unmarried. In the town that counts as a defect and she sees herself as a failure. A group of men sitting in the café decide out of boredom to play a joke: one of them will court Isabel, she will believe it, and in the end the truth will be told. Juan takes the task. The courting works. Isabel believes it and her life changes; she laughs, she makes plans, she tells the town. Juan sees where it is going and cannot continue. But there is no way back either. Juan Antonio Bardem writes and directs. Betsy Blair plays Isabel and José Suárez plays Juan. It is a Spanish and French co-production. The source is a play by Carlos Arniches; Bardem moved the story into his own period. The film won the FIPRESCI prize at the Venice Film Festival. Bardem was known for his opposition under Franco; he was arrested during the shooting of another film and the incident drew international reaction. The matter it treats is provincial boredom; the joke comes not from malice but from emptiness, and the film finds the real culprit in the town itself. Betsy Blair was an American actor working in Europe because of the blacklist. The narrative offers no deliverance and the ending is quiet. Who it is for: viewers who like Spanish cinema and social realist drama. Who it is not for: it is slow, bleak, and the subject hard to bear.