Autumn Days

Días de otoño was the last in a trilogy of films—that includes Macario (1960) and Rosa Blanca (1961-72)—adapted by Gavaldón from the works of Bruno Traven. Based on Traven’s short story “Frustration,” this unsettling drama stars Pina Pellicer as Luisa, a provincial young woman newly arrived in Mexico City who finds a job as a cake decorator. For the dreamy Luisa, it proves an appropriate line of work as she comes to display a remarkable talent for embellishing the truth, as well. When her new boss, Albino, begins making advances, Luisa’s fantastic imagination takes flight. She invents a boyfriend, an impending marriage and even a false pregnancy. It’s a fragile world of delusions that ever-threatens to come crashing down around her as Gavaldón exposes the surface appearances that govern even the most intimate of relationships in Mexico’s developing urban middle-class. –UCLA Film Archive