Most of this film is the contemporary memoir of a middle-aged homosexual magician named José (Héctor Alterio). It opens in Granada in 1936 when José as a small boy is seduced by an older boy who is living in the elegant old house where poet Garcia Lorca is murdered. Fast forward. José is an actor and magician, a discreet homosexual who lives alone and has an occasional affair with Miguel (Xabier Elorriaga), a young politician who finds it more convenient in Madrid's high society to marry than assert his homosexuality. José is a man romantically possessed and obsessed by his childhood in Granada during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1936.
Now in his 50s, José returns to Granada and relives his childhood there. He recalls the time when he fell in love with Garcia Lorca and had an affair with one of Lorca's own lovers. Memories come flooding back to him, of youthful sexual conquest, of Lorca's murder at the hands of Francos' agents, and his own early homosexual affairs. José's entire life is colored by his obsessions with Garcia Lorca, his unknown God, to whom the film is dedicated.
José travels twice to Granada. First, he revisits a woman who is also obsessed with Garcia Lorca's memory, and steals a photograph of the boy with whom he had his first sexual encounter. Later, José returns to Madrid to a party in search of his youth, and meets a pianist with whom he had sexual relations many years before but now does not remember. In Madrid, he is a man tormented by his past and in search of peace. Listening to a taped recording of Garcia Lorca's famous "Ode to Walt Whitman", he desires nothing more than to face the rest of his life in loneliness, although his recent lover, Miguel has returned to his bed and wants to continue their affair. José realizes that he is really all alone in their world, alone with his God.
This film is a complex memoir about an aging man coming to terms with his homosexuality and mortality. It was a pioneer in its frank and mature examination of homosexuality. In fact, it astonished some European critics for its candid, unhysterical treatment of homosexuality, but the movie seems self-interested, even arrogant. It's lovely to look at, highly cultivated and poised, but very difficult to get to know. A handsome, densely packed, evocative movie, it makes a lot of demands on anyone who views it and it has to be prepared for.
The film is full of secret signs and mysterious associations. Over it all hangs the ghost of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), the Spanish poet, playwright, and political activist who was murdered in 1936 by the Falangists who hated his homosexuality as much as his left-wing politics. Luis de Pablo composed the music. The screenplay was written by Elias Querejeta and Jaime Chavarri based on a script by Francisco J. Lucio. Jaime Chavarri directed. In Spanish with English subtitiles. For some reason subtitles are missing in two key sequences in which José plays a tape of himself speaking Garcia Lorca's poetry. Possibly the director thought it would be a sacrilege to translate the poet's lines as mere subtitles. The English title is "To an Unknown God".
