Felicitas

A commercial and critical success in its native Argentina, this is the true mid-19th-century story of (ironically-named) Felicitas Guerrerro de Álzaga (Sabrina Garciarena), whose happiness is constantly defined by the men around her, and even by her apparently loving sister, as what they consider to be best for her and her family’s estate. A valuable asset, at age 15 she is plucked from the arms of her lover Enrique (Gonzalo Heredia) and married off to the richest man in Argentina, forty years her senior (Luis Brandoni). The grotesquery of the white-haired husband caressing his porcelain-skinned child bride aside, Álzaga is hardly an ogre, but a life in which she could conceivably find happiness and mutual respect is threatened by plague, a secret from his past (undeveloped beyond a cog in the plot mechanics to get him briefly out of the way), and the reappearance of Enrique.

This latter gets short shrift, required simply to look pretty or brooding, but he does transform unexpectedly from the idealised partner of the opening rural idyll into a war-brutalized ogre and, finally, bogeyman; his attitude towards women-as-property is eventually no more enlightened than that of Felicitas’s father. When their rupture comes, it is so sketchily explained as to be almost bewildering, but his contribution to the tragic ending – presented with admirable restraint in a short sharp shock – tearing her from the bosom of real, grown-up happiness, finally strips the film of all romanticism, exemplifying the impossibility of Felicitas’s finding happiness on her own terms in the society of the times.


The film starts out like a “they’ll never let us be together” story (yes, those words are spoken), but is as much concerned with depicting the oppression of women in this time and place. One of the film’s problems is that it cannot quite decide to be one or the other and ends up superficially straddling both camps: it’s only a matter of time before the frogs Felicitas collects and keeps in jars are explicitly granted metaphor status, and the brief mention of her (male) cousin’s proto-feminist thesis is given no context regarding the wider struggle for women’s rights outside the narrow compass of the story, or even in terms of his character.
Likewise, Enrique’s role is muddled, and by the end one can no longer quite understand his power over Felicitas, for whom the torch had apparently burned out some time ago. But at the centre of it all, Garciarena gives a full-hearted performance, delightful as the laughing child-woman, and luminous as the strong and beautiful young widow ready to take on the responsibilities of her estancia, Barbara Stanwyck style. The passions are not quite as swoon-inducing as they might be, and the film, though full of incident, rarely (before the end) touches on excitement, but its deficiencies of emotion and incisiveness are amply compensated for by consistently lovely photography, a lush but restrained Nico Muhly score, and the marvelous frocks, furniture, and sets of the gorgeous production design.

d María Teresa Costantini p Daniel Pueyrredón sc María Teresa Correa Ávila, María Teresa Costantini, Sabrina Farji, Quadros Felix, Graciela Maglie ph Lula Cavalho ed Laura Bua ad Cristina Nigro m Nico Muhly cast Sabrina Garciarena, Gonzalo Heredia, Alejandro Awada, Ana Celentano, Luis Brandoni, Nicolás Mateo, Antonella Costa, José Luis Alfonzo
(2009, Arg, 128m)