[La Prima Angélica] is an attempt to explain the significance of the Civil War to a generation, specifically the generation too young to have fought in it. Saura has claimed that his film is the first to be made about the Civil War from the point of view of the side which lost. Luis, the central character, lost the war as a child because it traumatized him, and the film demonstrates that thirty years later the wounds remain. The crippling effects of the traditional combination of church and family are seen here against the background of the national trauma of civil war. The film is notably critical of the church: its characters include a thuggish priest, a vindictive nun with stigmata and a priest expatiating on the dimensions of Eternity to a group of cowering boys, a scene which recalls a well-known passage in A Portrait of...