

AVENTURERA (Mexico / 1950) 



The ranchera and the cabaretera were two of the most popular Mexican film genres that thrived under the emblem of the "Golden Age," which the country's cinema experienced from roughly about the early 1940s through mid 1950s. The former often combined a pastoral setting with fashionable songs, romance and comedy; the latter, largely unfolding in seedy urban musical venues, readily employed doses of extravagant melodrama and film noir, and when at its best, depicted the changing mores and values of the era.

While Alberto Gout's Aventurera ("adventuress") came out when the cabaretera was on its last legs, it became immensely popular with both the audiences and the critics, partly due to Gout's penchant for employing genre conventions in order to subvert them. The fact that the film also featured the sexy and spirited Cuban-born rumbera, Ninón Sevilla, who was once referred to by Jacques Rivette as "an oblique challenge to bourgeois, Catholic, and all other moralities," certainly didn't hurt. She plays Elena Tejero, who after experiencing a whirlwind of events leaves her hometown and ends up in Ciudad Juárez, where she reacquaints herself with a suave admirer (the ubiquitous Tito Junco, who many may recall from Buñuel's A Woman Without Love [1952]) only to be betrayed by him in the worst of fashions. But instead of accepting her fate like a Mizoguchi heroine, Elena starts bustin' skulls on a nightly basis, eventually winning the freedom to live and love anew. However, the past and the hypocrisies of society do catch up with her, forcing her once again to fight back with a vengeance.

The first of a trilogy of cabaretera films Gout made with Sevilla, this effort not only turns the tables on the conventionally esteemed figure of "the mother" in Mexican cinema, it also goes against the grain of the genre's traditions to seek some sort of a future for its embattled protagonist. Speaking of whom, Sevilla is as comfortable exchanging sarcastic barbs and more with her high-society mother-in-law (the great Andrea Palma), her one-time pimp (yep, it's that kind of a film), as she is shakin' her stuff on the dance floor. Exquisitely shot in black-and-white by master DP Alex Phillips, once a mentor to Gabriel Figueroa, and sporting musical numbers from some of the best Latino musicians of the time-period, Aventurera was selected by The Village Voice's Jim Hoberman as one of the top ten films of 1996.