A young drama student auditioning for a part playing the legendary actress Empar Ribera decides to get some insights into her character by interviewing three of Ribera's former pupils, all life-long friends who are now middle-aged. Glòria Marc has become a distinguished tragedienne in her own right and romanticises the theatre. Assumpta Roca has found great success as a salty popular comedian on television. Maria Caminal renounced her profession in order to direct dubbing sessions in the film and television industry. Maria would like to see Glòria and Assumpta act together but their rivalry is so great they cannot even share a stage.

When the three were students, each of them vied for the role of Iphigenia in the last production Ribera would direct. To show which competitor had won the part, Ribera sent a miniature theatre to the winner: Ana, a collegue and fourth member of the clique of friends, won. But Ana died two weeks before the play was to open. Ribera asked the other three to decide among themselves who was to play Iphigenia. Maria found competing over her dead friend's role distasteful and bowed out. However, Glòria and Assumpta decided to go for the part.

In the present, Maria learns she has cancer and subsequently dies. The drama student does not get the role of Ribera and Glòria and Assumpta learn how to value their friendship, live with their rivalry and share a stage.

In Actresses, a toy theatre acts as a metaphor for the film's main theme. The theatre, glamurously ornate, lushly painted in purple and gold, and complete with miniature performers, is given to the young drama-student protagonist as a child, but when she loses the figurines, she loses interest. At the end of the film, the object whose possession symbolised each of the protagonists' aspirations is rejected and burned. In the film´s terms, reducing this theatre to ashes is a laying to rest of the past. But it is also a symbol that there is no theatre without actors, the people who breathe life into it.

A romantic notion, but it's not one without truth. One can imagine great cinema without actors (think of documentary, animation the avant garde) but the theatre can't go on without performers. However, Actresses is not about actors in general. Acting for film and television is barely mentiones and is, not unexpectedly, dismissed with disdain (this film was based on a play).

The thematic grist here is embedded in debates around particular types of theatre ( the classic versus the popular) and a particular kind of performer (the diva).

It is a premise so hoary one remembers when the art form in question was literature (1943's Old Acquaintance, for exemple). However, perhaps because it offers great opportunities for actresses, such a premise remains appealing, particularly when it is realised with the kind of charm and skill one finds here.

The film is structured as a kind of investigation. In finding information about the legendary Empar Ribera, the drama student is also finding out about what happaned one fateful summer when the protagonists were young, what types of actresses they turned out to be and what types of women they turned into. Actresses are found of quoting the olde adage that actors are something less than men and actresses are something more than women. The implication is that being an actress, particularly a star, is somehow in conflict with being a woman. Films such as All about Eve (1950) often uncritically take this as read. This means they often also function as inquiries into the nature of femininity which can be tinged with misogyny and facile camp. Thankfully, Actresses has the good taste to frame its loving and admiring look with admirable restraint.

Ventura Pons, the famed Catalan director, has resisted the temptation to invent external settings for the action. Instead he delicately opens up what is essentially a theatrical chamber piece by creating a sense of movement within particular interiors, often through almost surreptitious camera moves on faces. The same skill, taste and restraint is visible in the direction of the actors. Núria Espert as Glòria Marc and Rosa Maria Sardà as Assumpta Roca downplay the potential bitchiness of the excelent dialogue and choose economy of voice and gesture over the emotional pyrotechnics for which less subtle actresses might have won plaudits.

This is a more difficult and more rewarding route. What emerges is a film that is a closely observed character study of three women who love acting and each other. While they put the past to rest, we get to watch them show off for each other, savour the skill with which they can inflect their line readings and share their joy in the literature they speak.

"E.R." is one of the best comedies of Benet i Jornet; "Actresses", based on this text doubly theatrical, is, with no doubt, the best film of Ventura Pons. Also doubly: because it is a maturity work, that the director films with as much serenity as elegance, and because Ventura is (has always been) a man of the theatre, who loves without mesure that exciting and contradictory universe where coexist, in an inextricable way, art, terror and exhibitionism.

At first sight, "Actresses" can remind us "All about Eve". There is a young candidate to become actress who want to obtain the main role of a play about the life and miracles of the great Empar Ribera, as mythical as apocryphal, and she turns to her favourite disciples - Glòria Marc, an international diva; Assumpta Roca, a panther domesticated by the television, and Maria Caminal, exiled at the dubbing rooms - researching information and "something else", a "something else" that makes up the essence of the film... and the theatre. But while in "All about Eve" several narrators explain successives fragments of a same story, "Actresses" (not to leave Mankiewicz) would be closer to "Letter to three wifes", where a same story is narrated from three different angles, at first opposites and at the end complementaries.

As a minimalist "Follies", without songs but with the same acidity, "Actresses" is, simultaneously, the chronicle of lost illusions and the story (much more complex than its smooth surface suggests) of a vampiric inoculation: the poison of theatre to stand the poison of life. "Actresses" is a bitter comedy, very funny and (rara avis, in our theatre and in our cinema), deeply adult; a major piece from one of our best dramatist, and a gift. A gift that Ventura Pons has done to himself and to the adult public, that public who will change with pleasure the usual tons of special effects for a magnificent story of three characters and three superlatives performances. Núria Espert, Rosa Maria Sardà, Anna Lizaran and Mercè Pons, ultraconscious of the bite offered and splendidly directed, run here a "cross-country" of intensities and achieve the finishing line with a millimetric difference.

It is not difficult to foretell all the awards of the year for the artistic film unit of "Actresses", playing (not without risks: the balance between sublimity and ridicule of Núria Espert, the passion under the cynicism of Rosa Maria Sardà, the terminal wisdom of Anna Lizaran, the journey from innocence to knowledge of Mercè Pons) cheek to cheek in the Great League of the Great Actresses.

(...) Splendid adaptation of E.R., a play of Benet i Jornet that won the National Theatre Award, two years ago: a honest, fine and intelligent, held, even though dramatic peripetia of four women, three veteran actresses and one candidate to become one; a sensacional duel of performances (...). With this work, the director embroides a visual speech very personal, without forgetting the theatre, but with an intelligent and convincing use of the cinematographic tools. (...) The glorious confirmation of a great talent. (...)

(...) Actresses, the last Ventura Pons film and the unquestionable masterpiece of his filmography (...). It is neither All about Eve, nor Dames, it is simply, Actresses, the best work of a director prepared to preserve from the time erosion the best work of a dramatist who is in a state of grace. (...)

(...) Actresses overflows of great cinema, pure cinema. Actresses has all the elements that shape a masterpiece: the solidity of a text out of the ordinary, remarkably constructed and dialogued with master hand; a director, Ventura Pons, with a genuine theatre soul and a real cinema heart (...). And a subject, a Great Subject in Actresses: Life, no more else, with capital letters, seen through a profession where coexist friendship and jealousy, fortune and failure, success and frustration, ilusions that have disappeared but are ready to revive, always, this is the energic strength that feeds them. An inexhaustible movie, to be seen and tasted more than once.

(...) To its exquisite visual elegance, the film adds dialogues with an uncommon consistence. Moreover, the director has the complicity of dream actresses. He may have been the only one to obtain that Nuria Espert and Rosa Maria Sardà make a moderate and intelligent parody of themselves. The quartet of actresses breaths into a passionate veracity in a movie as theatrical as alive. Difficult, happy balance, reached by Ventura Pons.

(...) Ventura Pons, with an admirable and meticulous mise en scène, allows the memories crossing to raise to the category of a thriller (...).

(...) I have difficulties to find another movie as welldone, perfectionist and perfect, or simply exciting, as this adaptation of E.R. of Benet i Jornet(...). Ventura Pons (...) has surpassed himself, without making concessions and being always an excellent theatre director, he knows which are the peculiarities and requests of the cinematographic dramaturgy, he solves them with grace and generosity, he shows us the profit of having known how to see cinema during all his life.

Ventura Pons has built a movie of an exquisite architecture, of a total expressive strength, where the beauty is in the harmony of all the elements that form the feature film. A movie of actresses, but also of director, screenplayers, argumentist, Actresses is above all a movie of maturity. A great and dense movie about theatre, but also about life, that is, as we have so often said, simply a theatre.