butterfly and a flower, but the scene unfolds with such swift economy that it never feels heavy or ponderous. Suffice it to say that the idyll shared by the boy and his teacher, like Spain's respite from 1931 to 1936, is doomed. In the end mob rule will prevail, and even the boy will be implicated in betrayal.

To give this heartbreaking tale some shading, Cuerda has incorporated elements of the two lesser Rivas stories, and that move has worked surprisingly well. In one of them, little Moncho's older brother, Andrés (Alexis de los Santos), is magically transformed, by a vision of first love, from a struggling student saxophonist into a fluent soloist playing a tender ballad. In the other we learn that the republican-minded father of Moncho andand burning social commitment influenced earlier generations of Spanish moviemakers eager to defy the Franco regime. Direct and deceptively simple, Cuerda's moviemaking in Butterfly depends less on artifice than emotion.

To get it, he's chosen just the right actors. After auditioning 2500 boys, he picked young Lozano to play Moncho, and in this big-eyed, amazingly vivid kid, the director has found the perfect embodiment of an idea -- innocence corrupted by forces that innocence cannot fathom. It's the same notion that ruled The Bicycle Thief more than half a century ago, and it still has the power to move us. In Don Gregorio, meanwhile, the filmmaker revives another kind of classic character -- the idealist whose goodness threatens to destroy him. Gómez is now in his eighties, and his