Leopoldo Torre Nilsson is Argentina's most celebrated director, and has been called “unquestionably the best director to have emerged from Latin America” (David Robinson, Encyclopedia of Film). His films of the late 1950s and 1960s were compared to the work of such diverse directors as Bergman, Buñuel and Antonioni; most of them were co-scripted by Torre Nilsson and his wife, noted Argentine novelist Beatriz Guido. They are treatises on the decadent world of the Argentine upper bourgeoisie, “who live shut away from everyday realities, trapped by remorse, amorality, corruption, obsessions, passions and illicit affairs” (Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Filmmakers). Summer Skin explores a tendency among this class to inhibit and distort human feeling. A virginal young woman is persuaded by her grandmother to marry a dying man on the promise of a new wardrobe and a trip to Paris. The strange compact between the man, obsessed with his prolonged illness and therapy, and the girl, torn between calculation and pity, develops into a situation of cruel paradox.