Despite All Adversities

Spanish-American Queer Cinema

Andrés Lema-Hincapié, Debra A. Castillo, Andrés Lema-Hincapié, Debra A. Castillo

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438459103, 9781438459110
• eBook ISBN: 9781438459127
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Despite All Adversities examines a representative selection of notable queer films by Spanish America's most important directors since the 1950s. Each chapter focuses on a single film and offers rich and thoughtful new interpretations by a prominent scholar. The book explores films from across the region, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's and Juan Carlos Tabío's Fresa y chocolate ( Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993), Marcelo Piñeyro's Plata quemada ( Burnt Money, 2000), Barbet Schroeder's La Virgen de los Sicarios ( Our Lady of the Assassins, 2000), Lucía Puenzo's XXY ( XXY, 2007), Francisco J. Lombardi's No se lo digas a nadie ( Don't Tell Anyone, 1998), Arturo Ripstein's El lugar sin límites ( Hell Without Limits, 1978), among others. A survey of recent lesbian-themed Mexican films is also included.

Part I

Queer Subjectivity, Desire, and Eroticism

1

Queer Couples in Señora de Nadie1

(María Luisa Bemberg, 1982)

DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER

Mirá si nos viera la tía Lola.

—Pablo to Leonor

Señora de Nadie is undoubtedly one of María Luisa Bemberg’s masterpieces, notwithstanding the enormous success of her last film, De eso no se habla (1993), with Marcello Mastroianni, and even the success (albeit more academic) of Yo, la peor de todas (1990), with Assumpta Serna. Although there is an important queer thread in all of Bemberg’s films, Señora de Nadie is perhaps the queerest of her filmic texts.2 Although Yo, la peor de todas is rightly recognized as a significant film for its transparent treatment of the lesbian dimensions in the life of the Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695), a balanced assessment of Bemberg’s ideological commitments along a line that connects feminism with queer attitudes must give preeminence to Señora de Nadie for the way it engages in an unflinching and intransigent revision of heterosexist matrimony.3

Anyone who has seen the film treasures the moment, about two-thirds into the story, when Leonor, played by Luisina Brando, has, with all due deliberation, walked out on her chronically philandering husband in an assertion of prideful self-esteem, when someone who barely knows her unwittingly presents her to the man from whom she is estranged. The man making the introductions, because he barely knows her, pauses, at a loss for her name. When asked her proper married name (for surely any woman her age must be properly married), she looks her former husband in the eye and says, “Mrs. Nobody.”4 Of course, the trope works better in Spanish. Since the occasion is a formal party, a married Argentine woman, who is likely for everyday use to be known by her maiden name, becomes a “Señora de,” the “wife of,” a man. Here the possessive particle exercises not so much the much-vaunted function of signaling the way in which a woman must necessarily belong to a man. This is, of course, an operant point, though not the principal one. Rather, it marks the established imperative order of the hierarchy, in which men and women are paired off in what is very much the ground zero of the social order. Men and women may be flirting with each other with abandon, disappearing into bedrooms and bathrooms in the recesses of the house or exchanging phone numbers for subsequent assignations. But when the circumstance arises to evoke social formulas, such as in the moment of introducing guests to each other, there is a sudden, even if fleeting, reversion to accepted social order in which married affiliations, as signaled by the proper gender distribution of names, assume enormous significance.

As delightful as the moment is when Leonor goes on to introduce herself to her host and to the man from whom she is separated, by using her maiden name, the spectator must realize that Leonor is, after all, in no way a Mrs. Nobody. Fernando Morales (played by Rodolfo Ranni) is completely comfortable with attempting to woo Leonor all over again, both at the party and later, when he makes sure to show up at a remote and closed-up summer house in Punta del Este that she visits in preparation for trying to sell it in her job as a real estate agent. While they share a bottle of wine in front of the fire and make love on the plush carpet, Leonor realizes in the end that he will never be anything other than a conquering macho. And yet, Leonor’s renunciation of her married identity at the party, and the unswerving conviction that she comes to hold that she can never return to Fernando, must inevitably come up against the hard social reality of Argentina in the early eighties.

It is important to remember that when Bemberg made her film, Argentina was still under military dictatorship: indeed, the film premiered the evening before the April 2, 1982, announcement of the invasion of the Islas Malvinas (the Falkland Islands) by Argentine forces. The country was still dominated by an effectively unchallenged masculinist supremacy that would attain a new peak as the majority at first supported the military takeover of the British-held islands. Although the initial enthusiasm for the operation, which was a desperate attempt to regain public support for the dictatorship, quickly waned as unquestioned defeat at the hands of the British became evident (the misadventure ended with an Argentine surrender on June 14, at a terrible cost in lives to the Argentines), divorce did not formally become legal in Argentina until June 3, 1987, fully three and a half years after the return to constitutional democracy in late 1983.5 (It was approved by the Congress on May 7, 1987.)

In the film, Leonor uses the term “divorciada,” but clearly she is not referring to what is understood as divorce in post-1987 Argentina. Nor is she referring to the legal process that existed in Argentina before 1987: the separación de bienes, in which the courts could recognize the separation of the married partners—what in popular terms has been called in the Spanish tradition un divorcio de cama y mesa—and the distribution of common property between them. Such an arrangement might call for alimony for the woman and also for child support, but neither partner would have the option of legally marrying again in Argentina, and the father would also, in all likelihood, retain the final word in decisions involving the children.6 Leonor’s total abandonment by the legal code, reinforced by social convention, is apparent when she appeals to her boss to let her rent one of the apartments they have on the market, without paying the customary signing expenses. She confesses—with great reluctance, since she is loath to discuss her personal affairs—that she receives no alimony from her husband, has no bank account, and has no one to turn to as a guarantor. Leonor is truly in a no-win situation: she cannot gain access to her husband’s abundant assets, and she essentially has no financial standing of her own. Indeed, since she has announced to her sons that she has never worked a day in her life, it is remarkable, in the narrative universe of the film, that she can earn something of a living selling real estate. No information is given on how she lands such a competitive job.

Throughout the film, we see the interplay of two micronarratives of the heterosexist patriarchy.7 One involves the way in which Leonor must be convinced that she has made a mistake in walking out on her husband. The principal agent of this micronarrative is her mother (played by China Zorrilla). When her mother tells her that she had better be careful or she will lose her husband, Leonor is quick to reply that he may lose her. In fact, she is determined to forget him and refuses her mother’s advice to talk to him, for “hablando la gente se entiende.” Later, when Leonor does in fact talk to her husband, after they have made love, she describes to him why she finds his way of being a husband wholly unacceptable, to which he replies that her case against him applies to all men—or, at least, to all Argentine men as he understands them to be (as they must be, in conformance with the role he is playing). It is abundantly clear that talking things through has hardly been a profitable undertaking. One trace of the unequal role is his insistence on calling her “chiquita” during this discussion. And she replies that he is never to use that diminutive with her again. At issue here, then, is a formula that allows them either to comply with their patriarchally defined roles or to fall short of them. In this formula, women’s needs must be greater because of the dependent role women must play. Therefore, they have much to lose when the formula goes awry. Yet the stance that Leonor assumes is a blunt negation of dependency on him—a point that she makes forcefully by repudiating the affective address of “chiquita.” Leonor speaks to him both directly and indirectly, through other agents of the social system (her mother, her boss, and even the maid, who efficiently administers “her” household after she has walked out). Fernando even gives the maid a raise. If we subscribe to the proposition that language is less a trace of social discourse than it is its very substantiation, the errant instances of actual discourse involved in the micronarrative being described here are resounding.

The other micronarrative at issue in Señora de Nadie concerns the dynamics of matrimonial relations. We have already seen how Leonor cannot accept Fernando’s understanding of what it is to be a man and a husband—an understanding that appears rather conventional within the context of a masculinist, macho-dominated society such as Argentina under military tyranny.8 What is notable is Leonor’s rejection of this model. And even more remarkable is her apparent ignorance, in the beginning of the film, that such a model even exists. The separation between Leonor and Fernando is set in motion when, while out shopping for a birthday present for him, she spies his car with another woman in it. That woman kisses Fernando and gets out with affectionate gestures, including the hand gesture indicating that they will be in touch by phone later—one will later assume, for purposes of setting up a new tryst.

Leonor follows the woman, Gloria (played by Susú Pecoraro) into her place of business, an antique store. She gets Gloria’s attention by knocking over a valuable crystal chandelier. Apologizing and offering to have her husband pay for any damage, she hands Gloria Fernando’s business card. That Leonor would be carrying her husband’s business cards is one of the many passing details of the patriarchal identity that she is about to rupture. Gloria looks at the card and realizes what is going on. What is interesting here is that Gloria does not apologize in any way but, rather, confronts Leonor to the effect that she could hardly not have known what was going on, that businessmen like Fernando are inevitably going to have lovers. Leonor thinks aloud of the trips abroad, of late-night board meetings and similar commitments, weekend symposia, and the like.

In the micronarrative of marital relations, such as the long list of Argentine films that constitute the viewer’s horizon of knowledge in this regard, what is surprising is not the existence of Gloria (and many others, from A to Z), but Leonor’s blindness to it. In short, she has been a deficient student of the system. Confrontation with Fernando at his office (which we see only as a flashback when they end up making love in the house in Punta del Este) may be a conventional chapter in the micronarrative, but Leonor’s decision to abandon Fernando is very much a rupture in that narrative. Leonor will later tell her group therapy colleagues9 about how her mother abided unquestioningly by the narrative, at the hands of a physically abusive husband who subsequently abandoned her, and there is the implicit message that Leonor will not.

There is an ironic twist here because Leonor’s mother reads the cards to her and prophesies that she will meet a handsome bearded stranger. When the handsome Fernando shows up, he has acquired a beard, thereby not only fulfilling the mother’s prophecy but also complying unknowingly with her admonition that the two of them meet, talk their differences out, and get on with their lives. There is no mention of the children here, and it is a master stroke of Bemberg that we see the two young male children (about seven and nine), to whom Leonor confesses—as though somehow asking permission from her sons—that she has never held a job before in her life. But Señora de Nadie steps immediately away from the typical Hollywood divorce film in which the fate of the children becomes a high-stakes stratagem in the story. After all, in the stereotypical Hollywood film, the children’s very presence is confirmation that the work of the patriarchy is being satisfactorily pursued.

The two boys soon disappear from the film, and the fact that we do not hear Leonor refer to them again, except in passing (to the effect that she has nothing to offer them), or see her visit them again is a very hard-nosed decision on Bemberg’s part. She is, in effect, dismissing the role that these children play in the matrimonial dynamic of which they are, in a very real way, the expected fruit—and, moreover, the privileged fruit, since both are boys. As the younger one says in the one conversation between the two of them in the film, things are better with just us men here in the house: seven years old and already well on his way to win honors in the training course for preparing fully functioning Argentine males. Just as Bemberg gives short shrift to the Argentine macho—one of the most pathetic segments of the film is when Leonor has a humiliating tryst with a client—she appears to be unmoved by the emotional clichés attached to children, as one can perceive in her filmmaking in general.

Señora de Nadie opens and closes with a man and woman in bed. In the opening scene, it is Leonor and her husband, making morning love before the alarm clock goes off and they start the routine of their bourgeois day (which, in Leonor’s case, will include buying a birthday present for her husband, whom she subsequently sees with a lover, and so on). It appears to be a conventional sexual act, missionary style, with the man apparently in control in the top position. Now, this is a very remarkable scene, for it effectively establishes the patriarchal control of his wife’s body by Fernando, and when he finishes with her, he simply rolls off and seemingly goes back to sleep. Leonor checks the clock: it is time to get on with her many responsibilities.

Moreover, this scene is notably invasive, as the camera makes the bedroom its set. After all, patriarchal sex is a matter of the public record, because it is what gets the business of control and reproduction done. Perhaps not quite an act of voyeurism, Bemberg’s record of appropriate matrimonial commerce neverthele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Queer Subjectivity, Desire, and Eroticism
• Part II Gay Authorship—Queer Agency and Spectatorship
• Part III Bisexuality Experiences and Lesbian Identities
• Part IV Queer Relations with Families, Government, and Nation
• Contributors
• Index of Terms
• Index of Names
• Index of Concepts
• Back Cover