The glance of... Manuel Puig
El lugar sin límites
Boquitas pintadas
El beso de la mujer araña
Roberto Enríquez
To me, fantasy is synthesis, like cinema or dreams. A true model of synthesis, where within a minute you see a whole story”.
(Interview of Giovanna Pajetta to Manuel Puig published in Nº41 of Crisis, April 1986)
Manuel Puig started to write the films done by others and that he used to watch with his mother in a small town movie theatre in Buenos Aires province, trying to escape the claustrophobic lives they both had. Mr. Puig wrote novel despite films is what he wanted to do, until he realized that others were the ones that wanted to make films from his books. Somehow, that was the biggest achievement of his life. The recognition of his work, marking the beginning of pop literature, came late. His work was not taken seriously or his crazy love fantasies that he experienced with films were not taken into account in his biography.
Puig was, above all, a writer who read films and wrote from what he heard. From all the conversations remembered among women throughout his whole life, he created the female character of The Kiss of the Spider Woman.
The women created by Manuel Puig, and almost indiscernible to the male characters of Manuel Puig, are free because they are outsiders, expelled of the world where men rule. The feminine side of Manuel Puig is the imagination, the beginning, the words of the Holy Bible that instead of creating a real world, as was done by a male God, fantasies and creates a parallel universe, a cosmos that rises from the social exclusion to become the life on itself. A life not necessarily happy, prosperous or fair. The women of Manuel Puig play their cards and usually lose the game. They do not create to be happier, they create just to be.
It does not matter if it is a tragic heroine, a dull and melodramatic woman, or gossipers. Mr. Puig listens to them and creates a world of words where fiction meets memories, or what could have been if it weren’t for the macho world they inhabit and forces to disguise themselves.
Manuel Puig started to write the films made by others in his imagination, and he would end up writing his owns words in those films. He did it as a screenwriter in 'Heartbreak Tango', based in his own book, as well as for the film version of the great novel 'Place without Limits', from José Donoso, who he once compared to Ms. Deborah Kerr: “She never won an Oscar, but kept trying”. I can also see in his 'Manuela' the fascination of Manuel Puig for Rita Hayworth’s dance to Tyrone Power in 'Blood and Sand'. From 'Kiss of the Spider Woman', Mr. Puig only got the rights, which he sold, and the satisfaction of seeing Mr. Babenco base his work on his novel.
I would recommend to take advantage of the actual rise of the 'after pop' literature, to read, enjoy, and pay tribute to the writer of the first pop novel in Spanish; Manuel Puig. He rewrote cinema, soap operas, and dialogues in a series of splendid novels, such as 'Betrayed by Rita Hayworth', 'Heartbreak Tango', 'The Buenos Aires affaire', 'Kiss of the Spider Woman', 'Pubis Angelical', 'Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages', 'Blood of Requited Love' or 'Tropical Night Falling'.
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El lugar sin límites
Mexico, 1978
Director: Arturo Ripstein
Screenplay: Manuel Puig
Producer: Conacite Dos
Starring: Roberto Cobo, Fernando Soler, Lucha Villa
Genre: Drama
Fiction Feature Film
110’
Based in a novel of José Donoso
Manuela, who has earned herself a place in a remote village as a transvestite, prostitute and father, fears the return of Pancho, a macho, truck driver and client of the brothel. Manuel and her daughter, La Japonesita, that now runs the brother, seek protection from Don Alejandro, the local chieftain, who is ready to expel the last inhabitants of the village.
The Place Without Limits explores the duality, the fear and hope. A physical and emotional geography of the decadence, where the macho disappears, while women remain the reference point that seduces even at their lives cost.
* * *
Boquitas pintadas
Argentina, 1974
Direction: Leopoldo Torre Nilsson
Production: Directores Asociados S.A
Screenplay: Manuel Puig
Starring: Roberto Cobo, Fernando Soler, Lucha Villa
Genre: Drama
Feature Film
120’
Nené, married and with two children, asks by mail to the mother of her former boyfriend, Juan Carlos, who died of tuberculosis, to send her the love letter they exchanged while he was at the hospital. Through these letters, Nene revives the blossoming of love in a small provincial Argentinean town in the 30’s, and the memories of other women, secondary characters in a story of classes, sex and conflicts.
Heartbreak Tango shows how frail a fantasy is to help survive the daily live and it collapses when faced with the memory.
* * *
El beso de la mujer araña
Brasil/United States, 1985
Direction: Hector Babenco
Production: HB Filmes
Script: Manuel Puig
Cast: William Hurt, Raul Julia, Sonia Braga
Genre: Political drama
Film feature fiction
120’
Molina, a homosexual arrested for having sex with minors, shares cell with a political prisoner, Valentín. Molina, through stories that tells and silences, with Nazi movies inspired in the golden Hollywood that he recreates, he makes jail days easier to go by. This frenzy of stories and recoveries culminates in love and revolution.
Kiss of the Spider Woman confronts us with reason’s fragility and prejudices in front of love’s duty when there is no other way than to sublimate it in another type of action.
