Passion sauvage

Beautiful María Félix was the ultimate "femme fatal" of Mexican cinema and it was unavoidable that she'd play Marguerite Gautier at some point in her career. The idea is not far-fetched except that director Roberto Gavaldón wanted a totally different "Camille" and he commissioned a script that would be both original and faithful to the original "Lady of the Camellias" by Alexandre Dumas, Jr. Of course, you would need a very creative writer, or group of writers, to achieve such a task so Mr. Gavaldón and producer Gregorio Wallestein decided to do it themselves. To keep within commercial parameters they also hired writer Edmundo Báez, famous for hallucinating all those scripts for Libertad Lamarque tearjerkers. The results are so confusing that it's hard to tell if you are watching a serious film or somebody is playing a joke on you. Let me give you the improbable basic plot.

Camellia (María Félix ) is a celebrated stage actress achieving great success playing the central character in "The Lady of the Camellias" at a local theater. However her private life mirrors the part she is playing on stage, a lost woman who sells her love in order to maintain her lifestyle. In the play, she drinks like a sailor while in "real life" Camelia is a drug addict. In "Lady of the Camellias" Marguerite falls for Armand, a socialite who could be her salvation. Backstage, Camelia falls for Rafael (Jorge Mistral), a famous bullfighter that wants to take her out of the vicious circle she is in and make her happy. Both Marguerite and Camelia know they are doomed.

Confusing? You bet! Especially when sometimes Camelia, playing Marguerite, utters dialog on stage that leaves you wondering if it's the real thing or the script. The only relevant thing in this debacle is the reference to drug addiction, namely heroin, very rare in Mexican films of the 1950s. Also a couple of love scenes between gorgeous Maria and strikingly handsome Mistral have a certain value from an erotic perspective. Everything else can be painlessly trashed out and forgotten for everybody' sake. If you like the subject, stick with the Garbo-Cukor 1936 version "Camille"

This is not the best movie of Maria Felix, you don't get to see the acting skills that you see in movies like La Generala or Doña Diabla, but i think this movie has the originality that its director meant to give to it, i personally like the original Camelia, but we can not trash this one by comparing it to Garbo-Cukor masterpiece, its a totally different film and in no way is it confusing, maybe when subtitled it gets harder to follow the movie but i as a Spanish speaking viewer did not got confused in any part of the movie and thought its worth seeing.

I recommend people to try to see the most Maria Felix films they can see, then you get to understand her as an actor and her characters as the tough Mexican woman who gain its nickname La Doña when she did her first movie hit Doña Barbara in 1943, in Mexican films from the so called golden century contain actors which usually created one character and that same character would star in all their films, such as Mario Moreno's Cantinflas, it is the same with Maria Felix's Doña, a hard woman which is most interested in money and tends to control men for her own advantage. One of the films of Maria Felix in which she doesn't uses this character is Maclovia in which she stars whit also great Mexican actor Pedro Armendariz under the direction of Emilio Fernandez, i highly recommend this film also.

So, if you are going to get into Mexican films try understanding the culture and never fall in the mistake of comparing Mexican film industry with the American industry, we are different cultures is understandable that our films represent different points of view and are acted, directed and written in the Mexican way.