If They Tell You I Fell 1989

In the years after the war, Catalan kids gather in circles among the ruins and weave aventis—open-ended stories that drift between memory, rumor, and fantasy. These tales mingle war recollections, local gossip, comic-book heroes, and real events, and the film unfolds them through flashbacks set in 1970, 1940, 1936, and the mid-1980s.

In 1970, Nito, Cesáreo Estébanez, a medical examiner assistant, and Sor Paulina, Mercè Sans, a nurse-nun who grew up with him, identify the drowned couple from a car accident. The dead man is Daniel Javaloyes, known as Java, Jorge Sanz, one of the central aventis figures. The woman appears to be Juanita, a former orphan, portrayed by Ariadna Navarro. The discovery of Java’s body stirs memories of events decades past, some true and some shaped by imagination.

In 1940s Barcelona, Java, a young man trying to escape poverty, shares a crumbling house with his mute grandmother. To earn money, he performs perverse sexual acts for Don Conrado, a wealthy, sadistic man who uses a wheelchair after war injuries. During one of these encounters, Java is drawn to Ramona, a visibly pregnant prostitute who is [Victoria Abril]. Ramona’s history reveals she had once been a maid in Conrado’s household and bears a scar on her left nipple from his abuse. Java’s longing for her deepens as the stories told by Sarnita—one of the neighborhood kids—start to blur lines between fact and fiction. Marcos, Java’s older brother and an anarchist, hides at the family home and longs to see his girlfriend Aurora Nin again, a figure central to the aventis; the two are connected to Ramona through the tales recounted by Sarnita. Fueguiña, one of the orphans at the institution where Sor Paulina works, plays the leading role in a religious amateur play about a martyr’s sacrifice, and Java, hoping to become an actor, blackmails Fueguiña to take the part of the devil in the play, though Conrado allows it only for rehearsals.

The 1936 flashback traces the war as Marcos fights for the Republic and seeks revenge on Conrado’s brutality toward Aurora Nin. When Marcos’ men cannot locate Conrado, they shoot Conrado’s father, and Conrado’s mother survives thanks to Aurora’s intervention. In a stark turn, Java takes a male partner, Ado, a teenager, in one of his assignments for Conrado, and through Ado he becomes entangled with a wealthy jewelry dealer, seeing in that connection a path out of poverty.

By 1940, Marcos’s old wartime cronies pursue him through secret anti-government plots, increasingly resorting to crime. Palau, the gang leader, and his partners Fusam and Sendra attack Menchu, a bleach-blonde prostitute who works for the Falangists, killing her brutally. As the net tightens, Java eventually guides Ramona to Marcos’s hidden place, and the former lovers are joyfully reunited, using the ensuing commotion to slip away from the city.

In the mid-1980s, on a busy Barcelona street, Palau glimpses an elderly couple asking for money who bear a striking resemblance to Marcos and Aurora Nin, hints that the aventis may still echo through the present day.