In Madrid, in the mid-1950s, Paco - a handsome young man from the provinces, serving the last days of his military service - is in search of both lodging and a steady job.

Besides supplementing her income with boarders, Luisa engages in swindles with underworld contracts, and is not above cheating her partners by skimming money off her illicit earnings.

Frustrated by his unfruitful job hunt and by Trini's refusal to have sex with him until they are married, Paco offers little resistance when Luisa seduces him, initiating an affair.

So intense is Paco's attraction for Luisa, that he abandons Trini for long periods, finally showing up at the major's house to spend Christmas Eve with her.

Things become more complicated for Paco by Luisa's shady business dealings with Minuta and Gordo, members of a gang of swindlers to whom she owes money.

Later, as the two sit in the rain on a bench in front of the cathedral of the town, Trini refuses to forgive Paco, and tells him she prefers death to abandonment.

The script was written by Aranda, Alvaro del Amo, and Carlos Perez Merinero, using some elements of the actual crime and reinventing many others to recreate the background of the characters, about which little was known.

The television project was halted from 1987 to 1990, and when the time came to start production, Los Amantes de Tetuán took a separate life from La Huella del Crimen.

The real life crime story was treated in the same way Billy Wilder used the facts that inspired his adaptation of Double Indemnity, the novel by James M. Cain.

That scene, filmed in front of the famous Burgos Cathedral, was articulated around two popular Spanish Christmas carols, Dime, Niño, de Quién Eres and La Marimorena, whose traditional cheerful melody, by contrast, is changed for the score into one that is elegiac and sad.

Alcaine is especially adept at evoking the 'sooty' look of Madrid winters, which convey the somber qualities of urban life during the early years of Francoist Spain.

Maribel Verdú, whose artistic culmination maybe is Ricardo Franco's La Buena Estrella (1997), is better known internationally for her roles in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2000) and in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006).

The three lead actors of Amantes had acted together before in another love triangle, in Aranda's previous project, Los Jinetes del Alba.

One of the main themes of Amantes is the destructive potential of obsessive passion and sexual desire a topic further explore by Aranda in La Pasion Turca (1994).

[6] Set in film noir genre, it depicts the young man, Paco, not as the master of the two women who love him, but as the malleable object of their competing scenarios.

Both are frequently robed in blue, a color feature in traditional pictorial representations of the virgin, and Trini takes with her a painting of the Immaculate Conception, hanging it in the hotel room just before her death.

[7] Just as Luisa forced Paco to take hold of his penis in their pursuits of pleasure, Trini coerces him to wield the razor that will release her from pain.

From the moment she opens the door to Paco, wearing a colorful dark blue robe and draped with glittering streamers she is using to decorate a Christmas tree, Luisa appears as a profane alternative to the Madonna.

Staged on a bench in front of the cathedral of Burgos (the small town of Aranda del Duero, in the film), the murder retains the aura of Christian ritual, especially since the minimalist representation of violence is limited to a few close-ups of the victim's barefoot and a few drops of bright red blood falling on the pure white snow.

There are also similarities to François Truffaut’s La Femme d'à côté, another amour fou film in which a lame older woman's own story foretells the tragic end.

The American movie To Die For, was inspired by the Pamela Smart case (the most famous crime in New Hampshire history) was compared to the similar plot of Amantes.

Amantes opened in February 1991 at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival where Victoria Abril won the Silver Bear for Best Actress.

Amantes was the first of Aranda’s films to get an American release, opening in March 1992 and becoming an important art house hit, getting more than one and a half million dollars at the box-office.