With cinephilia, the happy surprises never end, if you always investigates the legacy of world cinema and old titles you did not know, mostly from the 20th century. For me, Emilio Fernández was the Mexican director who dealt with native Americans, films with Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz , María Elena Marqués, Columba Domínguez and Roberto Cañedo.
Recently I saw by chance some beautiful B&W images of actress Silvia Pinal as a pretty country girl, against the Mexican countryside, under a sky of portentous clouds, product of maestro Gabriel Figueroa's eye... and I saw the stone face of the Indo-American man, of that treasure of Mexican cinema called Jaime Fernández, as her leading man. I said to myself, "I have to see this!", and so I did. It is worth adding that I had forgotten Indio's love passion in his films, the erotic debauchery that he revealed through the bodies and faces of dancer Ninón Sevilla in «Víctimas del pecado»; María Félix, Rossana Podestá or Armando Silvestre, in «Enamorada» and «La red», and Rebeca Silva, Jorge Rivero and Mercedes Carreño, in old age, but still current, in «Erótica» and «La Choca».
In this way I discovered that «Una cita de amor» is one of Fernández's most beautiful films, a work of Spanish inspiration, based on Granadan author Pedro Antonio de Alarcón's story «El niño de la bola», freely adapted to México. It is a strong melodrama of "l'amour fou" and passion, taken to the extremes from the first minutes, when Soledad, the country girl (Pinal), gives herself sexually to her beloved in an unequivocal way, under Figueroa's majestic sky. The drama goes from pain and tears without restraint, to rebellion, an echo of Mexican revolution exploding in 1910, in a deadly duel between Don Mariano, a ruthless and arrogant landowner (Carlos López Moctezuma, more perverse than ever) and his rival's son, the mythical Román Suárez (Fernández). He oposes his daughter Soledad's love for Román, to whom there will be no one to take his woman, even if it costs him his life.
The Mexican army quickly intervenes, making things worse. It is a duel for the possession of the land and for the possession of the love object (both Soledad's and Roman's), in the center of which there are an imposed bland boyfriend (Guillermo Cramer), a hypocritical priest (Arturo Soto Rangel), sided with Don Mariano; and the maid Genoveva (Amalia Mendonza aka La Tariacuri), Soledad's ally, who was also a victim of the landowner's cruelty.
Traditional music, so punctual in Mexican cinema, has an overwhelming presence here: the love date of the title is to dance a folk tune in the town square, taken by the army, in the midst of imminent danger; but, above all, music is part of a dramatic anthology sequence, which goes from the moment when Mariano publicly forbids Soledad to dance with Román in the same square; it continues with Soledad's meeting with Genoveva in the kitchen, to whom the girl hands a bottle of tequila and says, "Sing, Genoveva, even if we leave the party without mariachis!"; it continues with a fatal shooting that defines everybody's fate in a cantina where an old man plays a sad melody on guitar, and it returns to the kitchen where Genoveva and Soledad sing a heartbreaking duo, which deserves a place among the most sublime moments of the golden age of cinema in Mexico.
A wonderful film of love and obsession, of death and eroticism (always, hand in hand), which concludes with an eternal dance of love. «Una cita de amor» was nominated for the Best Film Golden Bear at the 1958 Berlin Film Festival.
