The Crack: Inception

Madrid, 1975. Franco has just died and the country does not know what it is about to become. Germán Areta has left the police and works as a private detective. A married woman comes to his office: six months ago her lover, a well-known tailor, died, and the official record calls it an accident. She does not believe it. Areta takes the case. The trail leads him through every layer of Madrid: men of the old regime, men setting up in the new one, and the people caught between. Nobody wants to tell him the truth. José Luis Garci directs the Spanish film; a hundred and seventeen minutes, with Carlos Santos as Areta, shot in black and white. Garci had made two films with this character in the eighties; this one goes back to before them. The period it covers is known in Spain as the transition, and the film shows it from inside a detective story.