The Red Virgin
The Red Virgin
Screaming with passion for visual aesthetics is Paula Ortiz as evidenced in some of her earlier works such as Chrysalis[+], The Bride[+](which was screened in the Zabaltegi section of the San Sebastian Film Festival nine yrs ago) and Teresa[+]. Now she goes back to the same film festival, this time with The Red Virgin [+] but it’s not competing for any awards. This is an act of a very brutal episode that happened as far back as 1933 in Spain during the Second Republic, one which has already been depicted on film by the actor and film maker Fernando Fernán Gómez in 1977 in the feature My Daughter Hildegart.
The bulk of the headlights for that movie lay on a wonderful Amparo Soler Leal, who with her highly conventional charm, was able to inject truth, energy and Verismo to a huge storyline which opened with the admission of a crime: the murder of the titular character at the hands of her liberal mother, Aurora Rodríguez, who had methodically bred and violently upbraided her with the grand designs of altering the course of history. That movie was built along a structure whereby a guilty man’s remorse provided the dominant image of a crime and its trial sequence.
Now Ortiz has taken up this gruesome tale once again – with a larger budget and great production effort of costume and accessories, photography and locations. Assisted by her screenwriters Clara Roquet and Eduard Sola, she has also transformed the narrative of the classical Spanish cinema (for instance, we won’t witness the abovementioned trial), strengthening the role of the maid (performed by Aixa Villagrán), and giving a few of her distinctive appearances.
As in her childhood, because Hildegart, played by the interesting Alba Planas, was made by Aurora to be ‘the woman of the future,’ she became one of the most intelligent and matured feminist brains of Spain in 30’s. However, when she is eighteen, this girl meets a young and handsome man (actuated by Patrick Criado) so that he begins to present to her the other universe outside the iron ring of maternal morality, and it ends with something terrible as well.
However, The Red Virgin never attains that intimacy and ordinariness which is the hallmark of the duo Fernán Gómez – Soler Leal. Inevitably, one falls into the odious comparison between the famous Spaniard in cinema with this new film, and the actress who plays that same imbalanced woman, the ‘heavens’ above: a stone faced Najwa Nimri.
No amount of raspy whispering escapades, coming stupor out of her throat, will tell us the shadows, the nature, and the emotional scarring of an equally intriguing character, thoroughly stressed by the insecurity and dread of losing control of her child built her, a Spanish drag of Carrie’s mother – this time ideologue- fanatic of order – whom, as Ortiz here stresses, had enough of being a sexually liberated woman, while her daughter walks around mouthing that “love and revolution cannot coexist”!
Red Virgin is the official project of Amazon MGM Studios in partnership with Elastica, the executive producer Maria Zamora included.
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- Genre: Drama, Mystery
- Country: United States, Spain
- Director: Paula Ortiz
- Cast: Najwa Nimri, Alba Planas, Aixa Villagrán
