Stress Is Three

Director: Carlos Saura

1968 / 94min / Digital

An automobile driving from Madrid to Almeria becomes a veritable pressure cooker in Saura’s formally audacious road movie. The passengers are a well-to-do industrialist, Fernando (Fernando Cebrián); his wife, Teresa (Chaplin, blonde and blasé); and Fernando’s architect colleague, Antonio (Juan Luis Galiardo), who Fernando is increasingly convinced has been having an affair with Teresa. Boasting some of the most blinding whites you’ll ever see in a black-and-white film, which only adds to its oneiric quality, the little-screened Stress is Three is an achievement on par with Saura and Chaplin’s very best, a withering critique of bourgeois hedonism and Spanish machismo ripe for rediscovery.

Distributor: Janus Films

Part of The Remembered Lives of G. Chaplin & C. Saura