The Little Apartment

Madrid in the fifties. Rodolfo and Petrita have been engaged for years and cannot marry, because their wages will never buy them a flat. His colleagues propose a solution: marry Dona Martina, the elderly and failing woman whose apartment he lodges in, and inherit the lease when she dies. Rodolfo starts thinking about it, and so does Petrita, both of them entirely aware of what it means. The film was actually directed by the Italian Marco Ferreri; the rules of the time required a Spanish co-director on the credits. The script comes from Rafael Azcona's own novel. It flopped completely in Spain on release and became a cult film later. It tells a story about housing poverty as a joke and leaves something genuinely cold inside it.