Set during the brief period between the deposition of the Spanish monarchy and the rise of Franco, Butterfly offers a Spanish variation on an ordinarily Italian strand of filmmaking—from The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis through 1900 and Life Is Beautiful—that portrays the rise of fascism from the perspective of ordinary, unsuspecting citizens. It's an approach that almost always works, showing the insidious encroachment of the politics of hate into the daily lives and minds of the people. Though there's never much doubt that his film will eventually get around to it, director José Luis Cuerda largely holds back on the fascist imagery, giving Butterfly time to establish its provincial setting and inhabit it with characters worth caring about. Chief among these are a sensitive, impressionable young boy (Manuel Lozano) and the kindly, idealistic, leftist schoolteacher (Fernando Fernán Gómez) who befriends him. Though their friendship has time limitations as strict as those that dictated the central relationship in Old Yeller—and their town's sunlight-suffused cheeriness is destined for darkness—Cuerda discards those issues for most of Butterfly, making its inevitable finale all the more powerful. An adaptation of several stories by Manuel Riva, the film's chief problem is that it sometimes feels like it, meandering through and lingering on seemingly unrelated episodes and neglecting its ostensible protagonists in the process. Without Gómez's remarkable gravity, Butterfly occasionally threatens to slip into familiar, sentimentalized Euro-nostalgia. It's a distracting tendency, but in the end, even that's a deceptive impression: Cuerda carefully creates a tapestry of small-town Spanish life and demonstrates how casually history can tear it to pieces.