Leopoldo Torre Nilsson is a true auteur, Argentina's most celebrated director whose films of the late fifties and sixties were compared to the work of such diverse artists as Bergman, Buñuel and Antonioni. Co-scripted by Torre Nilsson's wife, noted Argentine novelist Beatriz Guido, most of these films were 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 Films). 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 contract 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. "Summer Skin...operates on its characters with the savage, drastic surgery of a short story by de Maupassant or Chekhov...The attitude of the film is not misanthropic, but it does suggest that the sexuality we dress up as love's young dream is a devastating force held in precarious balance" (Robert Hatch, The Nation).