A Violent Beauty – María Candelaria, an Elegy for Things That Bleed

“There are things that bleed if you only touch them.”
– Alberto Galán, María Candelaria

María Candelaria (Emilio Fernández, 1943) opens with a montage of Aztec sculptures, Indigenous Mexican faces carved in stone – with high, sharp-angled cheekbones and full, brooding lips. We cut abruptly from the face of a statue to the face of a young Indigenous woman who works as an artist’s model. We cut again to a white artist (Alberto Galán) as he explains his art to an urban middle-class white audience, which includes a smattering of gringos. Before the film’s story is even underway, the central dynamic stands out in sharp relief. The native as an exotic colonised Other who exists to be looked at; the white Outsider as a cultivated voyeur whose privilege is to do the looking. In his 2001 book Images at War, historian Serge Gruzinski “reads the conquest and colonisation of Mexico as a struggle by one culture to impose a system of visual representations upon another.”¹ What we are seeing at the start of this film is that conquest in action.

Like any movie artist worthy of the name, this painter has an unknown masterpiece – in Honoré de Balzac’s words, a chef d’oeuvre inconnu – that he has long refused to exhibit. A white woman journalist is writing his biography and pleads with him to see it. He ushers her up to an attic bathed in deep chiaroscuro and momentously pulls aside the cloth that hides the canvas. The scene is a foretaste of The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945), another tale about a work of art that has the power to destroy its subject. We brace ourselves – as we might at a Hollywood film – for a flash of shock revelation. It is a standard rule of movie-making that every portrait hides a secret, one that exists largely, if not entirely, so that we the audience may have it revealed to us. We are recognisably in the world of Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) or Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) or Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948) or all those other Gothic melodramas where a portrait of a woman tells us far more than we ever do learn from the woman herself.

So imagine our surprise when we do not see the portrait. Not in this scene and not at any point in the film. What we see instead – in an extended flashback to the year 1909, one year before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution – is the life and death of the Indigenous woman who inspired it. The relationship of María Candelaria to her portrait is very much the one that has been made familiar by the tropes of ’40s film noir, a mixture of a painter’s unhealthy obsession and her own ineluctable fate. As Dominique Païni describes it:

Nearly every film that uses a painted portrait is a fiction in which passion is mad and destructive. This is no accident. The face is this unique writing surface of passion. The surface that needs to be destroyed, also, when resentment, regret, and hatred have been substituted for love.²

That is true, and doubly so, in María Candelaría. But as she is played by Dolores del Río, the exquisite but doomed heroine is too powerful an icon to be reduced to a mere objet d’art. Her portrait is never shown for the same reason Jesus Christ is never shown in those multiple versions of Ben-Hur. She is of a sanctity and a strength that transcend our everyday modes of representation. (We are told the woman in the picture is naked, so censorship may play a part too; but that is still no reason not to show her face.) In her big scene, María storms into a church and confronts an effigy of the Virgin Mary. Defiantly, she takes the Holy Mother to task for failing to help her with her litany of woes. The priest is shocked and tells her not to put tears in the eyes of the Virgin. We see the statue’s eyes in close-up; they are tearless, just lumps of cold white enamel. The only tears on screen are the ones María weeps herself.

Director Emilio Fernández knew what he was about in casting del Río as a woman who could upstage (and out-act) the suffering Mother of God. An inveterate self-mythologist, he recalled: “I wrote the story of María Candelaria on thirteen restaurant napkins and sent it to Dolores on her saint’s day because I had no money to buy her flowers.”³ On the surface, it was absurd to cast a glamorous international film star who was pushing 40 – and had recently returned to Mexico after spending two decades in Hollywood – in the role of an 18-year-old peasant girl who sells flowers. Yet del Río triumphs over her miscasting by never once attempting to seem younger than she is. Her presence is as ageless and iconic as that statue of the Virgin Mary in the village church – with or without the tears – or the painted icon of the Virgin of Guadelupe that nestles on a shelf in her one-room hut built of reeds. She projects such an overpowering air of fragility that we barely notice how her leading man (Pedro Armendáriz) is quite a few years younger.

Their love affair is transcendent in its chastity; the nearest we get to a conventional love scene is the couple afloat on a lake by moonlight, he steering the punt with a large pole as she plucks lotus flowers daintily out of the water. It is moments like this that alert us to the central irony of the film’s style. While he may set out to critique the notion of exoticism – with its passively objectified natives and its predatory white voyeurs – Fernández is in no way averse to dishing up exoticism for his own ends. His cameraman Gabriel Figueroa lays on plentiful vistas of dark native bodies etched against skyscapes of white clouds, or reflected in the depths of tropic pools. Yet this visual hyperbole is not a distraction in María Candelaria. It becomes instead the very form and substance of the film. As Julia Tuñón writes about Fernández: “It is clear that the violent beauty of his images do (sic) more than tell stories or exercise a style; despite everything, it gives his films life and emotion.”⁴ 

In the context of so much lavish display, the invisibility of the crucial portrait may seem doubly odd. But as the artist warns in the opening scene, there are certain things – and people too, perhaps – that bleed if we so much as touch them. The painted image and the naked skin of María Candelaria both fall into this category. A fantastical hybrid of exoticism and social critique, of Gothic melodrama and pagan Catholic myth, this is above all an elegy for things that bleed.

María Candelaria (1943 Mexico 97 mins)

Prod. Co: Film Mundiales Prod: Agustín J Fink Dir: Emilio Fernández Scr: Emilio Fernández, Mauricio Magdaleno Phot: Gabriel Figueroa Mus: Francisco Domínguez Ed: Gloria Schoemann Prod Des: Jorge Fernández

Cast: Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, Alberto Galán, Miguel Inclán, Margarita Cortés, Rafael Icardo, Beatriz Ramos, Lupe del Castillo, Arturo Soto Rangel

Endnotes