Top screenwriter Angelino Fons made an impressive directorial debut with this searing adaptation of Pío Baroja's classic novel. Set in turn-of-the-century Madrid, The Search follows a young man from the country, Manuel (Jacques Perrin), as he arrives in the city and drifts through a series of dead-end jobs and relationships. Unable to return home, yet trapped in a worsening situation in Madrid, he grows increasingly desperate; when his girlfriend leaves him for a richer suitor, Manuel gets into a senseless fight and kills a man. A romantic realist work in the tradition of Balzac's Lost Illusions or Dickens' Great Expectations, Baroja's original captured a Spain in which traditional values had been overturned by the laws of the market. One of the few genuinely successful screen adaptations of a major Spanish novel, The Search achieves a level of raw physicality rarely seen in the cinema; harsh shadows amid sun-drenched squalor serve to create a sense of a world in which natural forces have combined with social constraints in an effort to thwart human ambitions. Richard Peña