In "Amantes", Aranda focuses tightly on his three leading actors, effectively conveying the dreadful, consuming power of passion. The films portrays a mortal struggle between a strong phallic widow and a younger patriarchal woman for the love of a young man in a romantic love triangle. The widow derives her power from an intense sexuality and the religious idealism belongs to the young victim. Set in film noir genre, it depicts the young man, Paco, not as the master of the two women who love him, but as the malleable object of their competing scenarios. Luisa is introduced with a mouthful of candy, and draped with Christmas tinsel, almost as though she were a gift to the sexually frustrated Paco. Aranda thus sets up his central conflict with precision and power. Despite the physical beauty of the two women, it is the handsome young man who is treated as the primary object of desire. He is seduced by both women and is the object of the camera's erotic gaze. He embodies the 1950s generation torn between 'two Spains', represented by the two female rivals. Identified with the images of rural Spain, Trini is the traditionally stoically self-sacrificing embodiment of Catholic Spain, versus the modern vision of a newly emerging industrialized Spain, incarnated in Luisa, who is identified with the city and with the iconography of foreign culture (kimonos, Christmas tree ornaments), representing the modernizing version of Spain. Though the narrative eventually cast Luisa as the heartless instigator of Trini's murder, she can also be perceived as a rebel against the oppression of a macho culture while Paco, a traditional tragic film noir hero, is turned into a murderer by the two women who love him.