Cairo Station: Upper-Class Heroines
It’s not all about Jane Austen’s Emma, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Cinema too has its tragic figures of upper class women who defy the rules of the society in which they grew up because of their impossible love.
Francisca
Manoel de Oliveira, 1981, Portugal.
Style galore in this loose adaptation of the novel Fanny Owen by Agustina Bessa Luís, who in turn was inspired by real events. Francisca is the theatrical representation of the noblewomen Fanny and her sickly (literally!) love for two egoistic men in the XIX century. While the limited camera movements capture the immobility of the decadent and frivolous aristocracy of the time, the protagonists look toward the camera as if to underline the impossibility of escaping a doomed destiny. Recently restored in digital by the Cinemateca Portuguesa, this masterpiece positioned De Oliveira into the constellations of the great masters. Il n’y a rien que le langage.
Camila
María Luisa Bemberg, 1984, Argentina.
Another elopement gone wrong with the same romantic echoes of the most romantic of all centuries. In 1840’s Buenos Aires, the socialite Maria Camila O’Gorman Ximénez falls in love with a Jesuit priest defying the taboos of a bigoted and patriarchal state, at the dawn of a nation that is still fighting hard for basic women’s rights. María Luisa Bamberg’s fresco of a rebellious woman executed by the state wants to be a testament to a struggle, conceived just a year after the fall of the military dictatorship in the less romantic 1980s. “My films are an attempt to make women recognise themselves and learn more about themselves through the protagonists’ predicament. This is my ethical commitment, helping them to be free.”
Enamorada
Emilio Fernández, 1946, Mexico.
Class and gender (and love, of course), are the themes of this melodrama from the golden age of Mexican cinema where the upper class and religious heroine Beatriz discovers class struggle and rebellion through her love for a macho general. Shot in a rather classical style and spotted by sparkles of expressionist shadows, Enamorada tells the story of a political and sentimental epiphany, with a serenade scene branded forever in the history of cinema. Que bonitos ojos tienes, Maria Felix!
You can check out more from Cairo Station and listen to his past radio show’s here.
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