Movie review, early Mexican cinema, guess which movie

I began with an open mind, perhaps just faintly disturbed by some of the detail in the opening scenes: the skipping for instance; it was already easy to notice that she was a large, muscular woman, and that she skipped about her upper-middle-class home in stiletto heels with a jeune fille charm and abandon which suggested that an inevitable lapse to deep tragedy soon lay ahead. The plot moved fast from the start and then begun to accelerate. This makes sense in retrospect, seeing how much ground the story had to cover in its allotted one and a half hours. The telenovelas that this epic no doubt birthed don’t have such cruel and unnecessary restraints, and last without end.

I must admit that the betrayal of Dad took me by surprise. Mum and Dad’s best friend kissing was well staged and sure put an abrupt end to all the skipping. After that, after Dad blew out his silly little brains, after she took off to Chihuahua, after she got molested, abused, betrayed etc., after she launched into her endless and inept song-and-dance extravaganzas there was one more good scene as she walked, deep in thought, all alone, across the edges of the dance floor, smoking a big long cigarette, while a cute little guy sung about someone’s very sweet lips. She was nearly Marlene Dietrich briefly; then she broke a bottle over that bad guy’s head; that too was good. I never made it to the very end, though I lasted a very, very long time. I lurched to my feet during the Ping-Pong sequence, went down to the kitchen and became absorbed in doing the dishes, which turned out to be fulfilling, therapeutic, and, of course, higiénico. My wife filled me in with what happened afterwards.

One of the things that struck me about this film was that this Ninón Sevilla person barely restrained herself from revealing that she was an ante digital, early-sixties-cinema FX monster. There was a scene when she glanced at her Mother-in-Law, turning herself to profile and expressing rage and hatred to the poor sweet little dear next to her, when her eyes and mouth briefly morphed into something inhuman, twisting into forms never before seen in cinema or in life. She held back mostly, but you could see that potential all the time.

The bad guy, the one who introduced her to the Mum/Madam person, was great. I loved his twitchy smirk, and the way he adjusted his jacket.

My wife generously pointed out that the film had a woman’s liberation/feminist sub-text. There she was, a victimized female, savaged by brutal individuals in a self-indulgent patriarchal society, yet unbowed, resourceful, and finally triumphant. Well, I didn’t see the end, but I think that’s how it all turned out.