Forbidden Divas RIP

Lucia Bosè’s death earlier this year wasn’t much publicised in the UK — David Melville Wingrove discovered it months later, and wrote this beautiful piece. Some more months later, I’m finally publishing it, with apologies.

Imitations of Lives

“There are many ways to commit suicide and still go on living.”

~ Lucia Bosè, Of Love and Other Solitudes

There are stars whose off-screen life is a thing entirely apart from their on-screen image. Then there are stars whose lives on and off the screen seem to intersect in uncannily intimate ways. The Italian (and later Spanish) actress Lucia Bosè was emphatically a star of the second type. In 1967, the whole of Spain was agog at the break-up of her marriage to Luis Miguel Dominguín, the country’s most illustrious matador. Two years later Bosè starred in Of Love and Other Solitudes (1969) – a bleak and anguished drama of marital dysfunction and break-up. This was not so much a case of Art Imitates Life as one of Life or Art, What’s The Difference?

For most of the 50s and 60s, Bosè and Dominguín had been the premier glamour couple of Franco’s Spain. They lived in a palatial villa, had three gorgeous children and their inner circle included Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau and, more ominously, the dictator General Franco himself. “I can’t say anything bad about Franco,” Bosè remarked years later. “To me he was just a normal man. But my husband was more franquista than Franco, in any case.” It is comments like that which reveal the marriage was not a happy one. There can be no doubt that Bosè married her bullfighter for love. But as the years wore on, she felt increasing dismay at his right-wing politics, his compulsive womanising and his stubborn refusal to allow his wife to work. It did not help that she hated bullfighting and nothing would induce her to attend a corrida.

Anyone could see the couple came from radically different worlds. Lucia Bosè had been born in great poverty on a farm outside Milan. She had little if any formal education and had to work from the age of twelve. As a teenage girl, she survived the Allied bombing and saw the corpses of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, hanging upside down in the main city’s square. “I learned that horrible things happen every day,” she said. “All you can do is pull yourself together and keep going.” By the age of sixteen, she landed a job behind the counter at Galli, the city’s most elegant patisserie. One day a dashing older man walked in, took one look at the girl and declared she ought to be in movies. The name of this man was Luchino Visconti. It appears he had no ulterior motives; he was gay and had eyes at the time for his young and handsome assistant, Franco Zeffirelli. But he took Bosè under his wing and groomed her systematically into a star.

At first, Visconti had plans to star her opposite Gérard Philipe in a film called A Tale of Poor Lovers. But the funding fell apart so he introduced his protégée instead to Michelangelo Antonioni. She became that director’s first muse and starred for him in Chronicle of a Love (1950) and The Lady without Camellias (1953). She went on to work for other European auteurs, notably Juan Antonio Bardem in Death of a Cyclist (1955) and Luis Buñuel in Cela S’Appelle L’Aurore (1956). This was the career she gave up in 1955 in order to marry Dominguín and lead, essentially, the life of an upper-class Spanish housewife. At the time, she assured the world’s press that her marriage was worth every sacrifice. (One can assume Dominguín was phenomenally good at something apart from killing bulls!) But after twelve years, Bosè decided enough was enough and made her break for freedom. She demanded – and won – sole custody of her children and became the first woman in Spain since the Civil War to be legally granted a divorce.

The events in Of Love and Other Solitudes are in no way as dramatic as these. María and her husband Alejandro (Carlos Estrada) are a well-heeled couple who live in a villa on the outskirts of Madrid. He is an economist and university professor; she is an artist who works in stained glass. Her job, of course, is symbolic. (Be warned this is one of those movies where literally everything is symbolic of something.)  The art of stained glass is not primarily the art of creating anything new or even of reshaping objects in a new way. It consists almost entirely of altering the light in which things appear, of making them look new when in fact they are not. The couple have a son and daughter and a sizable domestic staff. But their house, with its long wood-panelled corridors and walls of clear glass, looks more like an expensive hotel than a family home.

The most annoying thing about Alejandro is that he does not do any of the things that bad husbands in movies traditionally do. There is no reason to believe he is cheating on his wife. Apart from one feeble effort to chat up a girl at his office, he seems to lack the imagination or the energy an affair would require. This is not so much a bad marriage as one that has gone stale. The husband and the wife have simply run out of things to say to one another, assuming they said much in the first place. María consults a psychologist who tells her: “Everyone who gets married is convinced their marriage will be different from the others – and then it isn’t.” What is interesting in this film is not the drama (there is virtually none) but the arid bourgeois lifestyle it evokes. Alejandro and María lead superficially modern lives, but in a country where social and religious attitudes have changed hardly at all since the Middle Ages.

María is the one character who seems in any way aware of this disjunction. Her family background is that of the pro-Franco upper class. A full-size portrait of Franco hangs just inside the front door of her parents’ house. In the next room, in a glass display case, are her father’s medals from the Civil War. She has an obscure sense this is not the world she belongs in – and expresses it in odd and somewhat childish ways. On one wall in her studio hangs a poster of Theda Bara in Cleopatra. In World War I this star was Middle America’s image of the Vamp, the Temptress, the morally and sexually transgressive Apostle of Sin. But it now takes a great deal of naïveté to see Theda Bara as threatening or subversive in any way. She entirely lacks the sophistication and sexual autonomy of the silent Italian divas – most notably, that of Francesca Bertini whom Bosè oddly resembles.

With her vast and haunted dark eyes, her ivory skin and her lustrous torrent of black hair, Lucia Bosè has all the allure of the silent divas and then some. There are stray moments in Of Love and Other Solitudes where she suggests Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of the Mona Lisa – who has casually stepped out of her frame and deigned to wander about among mere mortals. There are other moments where we notice her chunky and ungainly hands, her way of walking that is at once elegant and strangely awkward. Details like this do not destroy the illusion; they only make us like her more. This film proved a succès d’estime for Bosè and her writer-director Basilio Martin Patino. She followed it with a string of increasingly odd movies. In Arcana (1972) she plays a witch who spits live toads out of her mouth. In La Messe Dorée (1975) she is a socialite who hosts an orgy based on the Roman Catholic mass and winds up giving a blow-job to her son. Was it entirely an accident that her ex-husband’s friend General Franco dropped dead not long after?

She survived into old age as a truly glorious eccentric. At eighty she sported bright blue hair and a designer punk wardrobe and said she had every intention of living to 105. She appeared occasionally in movies but her true passion was a museum she opened to display her art collection, which was made up entirely of images of angels. Her closest companion was her son Miguel Bosé, Spain’s first out gay pop star and the transvestite Femme Letal in the Pedro Almodóvar film High Heels (1991). One almost wishes Almodóvar had starred his mother in a flashy, trashy remake of Travels with My Aunt or Auntie Mame. She could have played either or both roles to perfection and would, in fact, have barely needed to act.

Lucia Bosè passed away in March, 2020 due to complications arising from Covid-19. She was the first famous person in any country to fall ill and die in what would become a global pandemic. Her life was spent knowing that terrible things happen every day and the one choice we all have is to pull ourselves together and keep going. In the world as it is today, that stands as a legacy in itself.

IN MEMORIAM LUCIA BOSÈ (MILAN 1931-SEGOVIA 2020)

David Melville

E is for Estrella Vacia

CINE DORADO

Another installment of our alphabet of unruly passions down Mexico way, brought to you by regular guest Shadowplayer David Melville.

The Golden Age of Mexican Melodrama 

E is for La estrella vacía (The Empty Star) 

You get a lot by giving nothing. I have to give everything to get anything at all.

– Rita Macedo to María Félix

It’s no secret that Mexican cinema stole many of its best ideas from Hollywood or European models. A lavish 1958 production in colour and Mexiscope, La estrella vacía (The Empty Star) is superficially a rip-off of The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952) and The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954), two gloriously lurid exposés of the dark side of Tinseltown. Its writer/director, Emilio Gómez Muriel, plunges us into the same piranha pool of glamorous egomaniac monsters – all ready to devour each other at a moment’s notice, if that’s what it takes to get ahead. He also borrows the complex multi-flashback structure, where a big star is remembered by everyone they used and abused on the way to the top.

Stars, of course, don’t come any bigger than María Félix – who here triumphs over her limited acting skills by essentially playing herself. Cast as a ferociously ambitious actress named Olga Lang, she seduces and discards a series of hapless men, only to wind up as a wretchedly unhappy prisoner in her own luxurious cage. Her dark beauty was never more bewitching than it is here. Her huge basilisk eyes glow, with an almost orgasmic thrill, when an obscenely rich sugar-daddy gifts her with a hideous pink Cadillac (approximately three city blocks long) or a camp fashion stylist wraps her up in a ludicrously opulent chinchilla coat.

As we can guess from María’s flamboyant performance, the term ‘too much’ is not part of this lady’s vocabulary. Just in case we miss the real-life connection, the soundtrack includes snatches of ‘María Bonita’ – a hit song composed by Agustín Lara (one of Maria’s many off-screen husbands) in honour of the star herself. This intense degree of self-revelation is what makes La estrella vacía so wildly compelling. It’s been rumoured that Rita Hayworth refused to play The Barefoot Contessa because it was modelled too closely on her own life, and that Gina Lollobrigida turned down The Lady without Camellias (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953) for similar reasons.* María Félix clearly had no such qualms.

Not that the story is entirely true to life. The first flashback introduces María as a young wannabe from the sticks, newly arrived in Mexico City and hustling after her first job. The girl we see on screen looks a well-preserved 45 (María was born in 1914) and already boasts a fabulous wardrobe by Balenciaga and Jean Patou. Falling in love with a writer (Ignacio López Tarso) she gets pregnant but aborts his baby (two things Hollywood would not have allowed) and soon dumps him for a slick wheeler-dealer played by Tito Junco. Her new man catapults her to fame by a simple but effective trick. When a famous matador is fatally gored in the bullring, Maria pretends she was his fiancée and poses tearfully at his deathbed for a swarm of paparazzi.

There are, of course, whispered intimations of the casting couch. (As Maria’s alcoholic flatmate warns her: “Contracts don’t just get signed in offices!”) Still, the script asks us to believe that María never sleeps with Junco. She just graciously allows him to set her up in a lavish penthouse and star her in a string of prize-winning but money-losing motion pictures. (To be fair, many a Hollywood star’s memoir tells us much the same thing.) There are no such alibis when she hooks up with Mexico’s wealthiest tycoon. (“He owns the building you live in, the studio you work in, perhaps even the water you drink!”) He fires Junco, to whom María pledges her undying love and loyalty. She then promptly picks up the telephone and calls the tycoon.

María soon embezzles enough money to be comfortably set-up when said tycoon drops dead of a heart attack. She blows most of it, alas, on a new husband – a composer who takes a job with her company, and then uses it to screw all the available starlets. When María dares to complain, he beats her up and breaks her nose. It’s her gay stylist who helps her back from the brink, never mind that his loyalty strikes her as some sort of character defect. (“You know you don’t have anyone. That’s why you value friendship, because you have nothing else!”) He gets his due only after she dies in a plane crash. Moping around her mock-Beverly Hills mansion, one of the other men admits: “You are the only one who loved her without interest!”

Our own interest in La estrella vacía will hinge on an appetite for showbiz sleaze and gossip, and also a fascination with María Félix. That lady’s 30-year-reign as Queen of Mexican Cinema embodied a sort of Platonic Ideal of Motion Picture Stardom, one that was wholly divorced from minor technicalities like acting or talent. Unlike the heroines of The Barefoot Contessa or The Lady without Camellias, the tragic diva in La estrella vacía is not the hapless victim of a cruel and male-dominated industry. Whether we call her María Félix or Olga Lang, she is – gloriously and without apology – at once her own creator and her own myth. This woman has no need of a mere man to destroy her. Proudly, she is nobody’s victim but her own. 

David Melville

*Reri, star of Murnau’s TABU, sued the producers of BAREFOOT CONTESSA claiming the film’s plotline was plagiarized from her own life story. 

That’s entertainment

Very grateful to Masters of Cinema for sending me a complimentary dual-format edition of THE LADY WITHOUT CAMELIAS, and early, underseen Antonioni movie starring the stunning Lucia Bosè. Watched it with guest David Wingrove, which was a good decision — the film is slow to start, and the more people you have in the audience on such an occasion, the less likely you are to switch off. And I’m so glad we didn’t!

The picture begins with Bosè becoming an overnight sensation in her first movie — this Milanese shopgirl is now a rising star. The problems she now faces concern both love and art — can she achieve anything worthwhile in the cinema, and can she balance that with a successful romantic life. The reason both goals are so difficult is that the men in her life all want complete control of her, and are threatened whenever she tries to make a decision. It’s when this starts to become clear that the drama kicks in and the film goes from sliding past your eyes in a slightly apologetic fashion, to gripping you by the skull while fixing you with a hypnotic gaze. More of what we think of as the Antonioni style becomes visible as the story develops, also, as the drab studios and streets of the opening scenes are replaced with ultra-modern cinemas and chic, soulless duplexes.

They’re so chic they have a fire surround in the middle of the room.

Sophia Loren was apparently offered the lead role, but turned it down as being too close to home. But it’s Bosè
who really was a Milanese shopgirl (Loren’s background was less respectable), though Loren did work in the fumetti, as this character is supposed to have done. Bosè’s extraordinary glamour comes with a slightly uncomfortable edge — her waist is so slender it looks cinched, but isn’t. Her body achieves a blending of the voluptuous and the starved that no body should be expected to attain. Her performance has something of the glacial quality I associate with later Antonioni, but the movie invites emotional engagement with the character in a way that’s progressively less common in the maestro’s oeuvre.

The obvious comparison is Ophuls’ Italian opus, LA SIGNORA DI TUTTI, which likewise charts the rise and fall of a female movie star. That film begins with a suicide before flashing back, whereas this one adopts a straight linear path, maybe accounting for its trouble getting started, but the Antonioni is no less clearly a tragedy. While the fate that awaits Isa Miranda in the thirties flick is potentional death by her own hand, Antonioni’s heroine is threatened with spiritual death — the possibility of a life of compromise and failure. It’s potentially more depressing that way — Ophuls’ tragedy carried with it a built-in feeling of “if only”. There may be no “if only” in Antonioni’s world.

“Is every man in her life part of some conspiracy to drive her insane?” asked David W, quite early on. The answer is YES, with the multi-tier conspiracy consisting of the film business, family life, marriage, Italian society, and human nature.

David later apologized in case he was poor company, having been emotionally shattered by the experience of the film (of course, he was still spendid company, even while reeling). I never actually find films depressing if they’re good. This one I’d call devastating but not depressing. Fiona thought it was depressing, but she still liked it. Does that say something about our differing personalities?

David W tells me that only ill-health kept the octogenarian Bosè from her stated intention of appearing on the Italian version of Celebrity Love Island last year, which suggests that Antonioni’s askance view of celebrity may be more timely than ever.