Clara is the Price

Synopsis

In a city on Spain’s Costa Brava, Clara Valverde, a young beautiful woman, lives with her husband Juan. They seem to have a perfect marriage. Juan is an architect and has planned a daring urbanistic project. In reality, the project is not viable. Clara, to keep her marriage and finances a float, works as a porno actress in an underground film industry. In spite of her job and her marriage, Clara is still a virgin. Her marriage has never been consummated because her husband is impotent for which she blames herself. In her work she does not allow to be penetrated. One day she goes to a reunion with Kellerman, an American millionaire who seems to be interested into put into fruition Juan’s project. However soon Clara learns that what he really wants is to blackmail her. The owner of the house, Jorge finds out Claras’s real occupation and if she does not have sex to the American would tell everything to her husband.

Clara is brutally raped by Kellerman. She finds out that not only her husband is not really impotent as she thought, he has had sex with other women including Clara’s friend, but Juan also has an homosexual relationship with Miguel, the director of the porno films. She finally realizes that she has been only a coin changed in the hands of the men around her. Armed with a gun, Clara takes revenge killing Kellerman, humiliating Jorge and Miguel shooting them too.

Cast

Production

The idea behind the film came from Pedro Carvajal who wrote the screenplay. From Madrid he went to Barcelona and persuaded director Vicente Aranda to take on the project. Aranda was initially reluctant, but accepted to direct the film after making substantial changes to the script. However this is the only film in Aranda's long career in which he did not sign the script.

For the leading role of Clara, Aranda cast Amparo Muñoz, who was then not yet eighteen and had recently been elected Miss Spain. She was not a trained actress and this was her first film. Juan Luis Galiardo and Maximo Valverde, two popular heartthrobs of Spanish Cinema during the 1970s, where chosen for the male leads playing against type, one as a homosexual the other as an impotent husband.

With a budget of 9 million pesetas, the film was shot in studios in Barcelona and exteriors in Cadaques, Empuriabrava (Girona) and Delta del Ebro (Tarragona). The original title of the film, Pornografia (pornography), was banned by censors and was changed to Clara es el precio (Clara is the price).