Fifteen-year-old Maria Maravillas (Cristina Marcos) lives with her father, an unemployed photographer with a penchant for mildly erotic pastimes. As a young girl, Maravillas spent a good deal of time with a group of elderly Sephardic Jews, who became something like her godfathers. After watching a play directed by her favorite Jewish godfather, Saloman, about the life of the bandit Caryl Chessman, Maravillas witnesses the assault and robbery of a priest by a group of young delinquents. Curiously, though, the thieves have missed an emerald hidden underneath the victim's shirt. What was the priest doing with this gem? Why does he refuse to report the robbery to the police? Gradually, Maravillas is drawn into an eerie, treacherous underworld in which the characters in her real-life drama intermingle with those of the 'Chessman' play. Winner of the Silver Hugo (Second Prize) at the 1981 Chicago International Film Festival, Maravillas is perhaps Gutiérrez Aragón's finest treatment of the conflict between varying layers of reality, showing how invisible forces often conspire to unite or separate characters or alter the course of events, themes explored not only in his earlier works but in a host of other Spanish films. Richard Peña