La Spagnola

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Film Description

Darkly comic tale of love, sex and revenge set in New South Wales and based around Spanish immigrant Lola, her teenage daughter and her Italian husband, who takes the savings and goes to live with his mistress. When Lola sees him starting to enjoy the good life thanks to the savings, she plots her revenge.

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Partly subtitled

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Review by Laura Hird on 11th February 2003

The film opens amidst a dust storm in 1960's Australia. Lola, a fiery, tempestuous Spanish immigrant is shouting abuse at her husband, Ricardo, as he attempts to leave her for his blonde Australian lover, Wendy. Despite her lying in front of the car he's just spent all their savings on, to stop him going, Ricardo escapes, leaving Lola and her ungainly fourteen year old daughter, Lucia, destitute. The film then follows Lola's subsequent attempts at survival and revenge. She covers the house in cellophane, to protect it from the dust that heralded the end of her marriage. She scalps her daughter after catching her scratching her head, berating her for crying by telling her the tears will make her eyelashes fall out. Although the existence of the two women is bleak (Lola resorts to selling sex to feed them, the family pets are slaughtered and devoured, Lucia earns a paltry amount for translating for the lecherous local doctor) the vivacity of the lead character and vivid colour and humour, prevent the film from being too downbeat.


It is a convincing and imaginative look at the lives of Spanish immigrants in 1960's Australia based on scriptwriter, Anna Maria Monticelli's own experiences. The hot Latino emotions juxtapose well against the barren, bleak Australian landscape. You feel for the characters, particularly daughter, Lucia's deepening despair at her uncommunicative relationship with her mother. Lola is a survivor, but the increasingly desperate things she has to do to sustain this can make the viewer cringe at times (allowing an Italian immigrant to masturbate on her, in return for a piece of lamb, her home abortion via a skewer.) Despite this though, La Spagnola is a colourful insight into the life of immigrants and an excellent study of a mother/daughter relationship being eaten away by poverty and circumstance.

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