Flor silvestre - The Hollywood style in Revolutionary Mexico

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles, a cultural organization sponsoring the screening of classic and contemporary Latin American cinema since the late 1990s, will be doing one of their programs as part of the Los Angeles Conservancy long-standing series “Last Remaining Seats”. On June 23, 2010, it will screen Flor silvestre (Wild Flower, 1943) in the lovingly restored Million Dollar Theatre.

This is the deluxe theater where Sid Grauman launched his Los Angeles operations in 1918. Designed by Albert C. Martin and adorned with sculptures by Joseph Mora, the building’s ornamentation is Churrigueresque, Spain’s idiosyncratic rendition of the Baroque style. The theater’s pièce de résistence is the auditorium designed by William Woollett, with a beautiful coffered dome and ornate organ grilles. From 1950 until the late 1980s, the theater presented Spanish-language films and variety performances, or “variedades”, imported from Mexico. After renovations and upgrades, the theater reopened in 2008.

I have been writing some of Cinemateca bilingual program notes for these events since 2005. Michael Díaz, the founder and motor behind this lovely institution, asked me to prepare some comments on their summer screening, Flor silvestre.

I transcribe below the short text I wrote – more academic than conversational, as a blog would require. It is, however, a good point of entry to ponder the influence of the Hollywood visual and directing style on a team that formed the style and content of Mexican cinema, national and patriotic, for over two decades.

A period melodrama set during the 1910 Revolution, Flor silvestre is considered a classic work of Mexico’s Golden Era. This intimate yet universal love story fatefully shaped by the turmoil of social and political change resonates today.

The plot is anchored in the class and ideological divisions boiling under the surface of the iron stability brought by the Porfirio Díaz regime: A young peasant, Esperanza (Dolores del Río), marries José Luis Castro (Pedro Armendáriz), the son of the region’s powerful landowner. His parents coldly reject Esmeralda: “We all occupy a place in life, and those at the bottom (“los de abajo”), no matter how much they dream, will always remain below”, warns his mother. Soon the winds of the Revolution – in which José Luis participates – sweep over the valley, a tumultuous mix of idealists, reformers, opportunists and thieves. The murder of the patriarch by bandits pretending to be revolutionaries forces José Luis – now the father of a newborn – to honor an ancestral code of revenge, with tragic results. The story unfolds as a flashback, recounted by Esperanza to her now adult son, reflecting that modern Mexico has been built on its past, the land and the dead.

Flor silvestre made beautiful Dolores del Río a star of the Mexican cinema. She was already in her late thirties, and this was her first Spanish-language production. Her Hollywood career in the 20s and 30s playing exotic women had petered out. Paradoxically, the opportunity offered by Emilio Fernández, a director working in the classic studio style, to play a young naive character (the reverse of her Hollywood persona) became the first of their many notable collaborations, most famously María Candelaria (1944).

It also marked the first time Gabriel Figueroa, a cinematographer trained by Gregg Toland in ground-breaking photographic techniques and powerfully influenced by the Mexican muralists, European painting and Sergei Eisenstein, worked with Fernández. Screenwriter Mauricio Magdaleno was brought on board, for the first also of many projects together. Established star Pedro Armendáriz would be paired again with Dolores del Río in María Candelaria and other Mexican classics.

In Flor silvestre Fernández and Figueroa began to develop a highly pictorial visual style, including a type of narrative and characters that defined Mexican cinema and “Mexicanness” in the 1940s. These films were lyrical and patriotic, and they celebrated not only the country’s geographical beauty but also idealized its indigenous population, showcasing them as archetypal figures steeped in tragedy and fatalism. Dolores del Río and Pedro Armendáriz are the first of many ill-fated couples: in Flor silvestre they embody the tragedy of lovers destroyed by social prejudice and incomprehension.

The film is a visual delight. The audience will appreciate the beautiful way Figueroa’s camera sculpts the human figures and a landscape of clouds and maguey using chiaroscuro techniques and curvilinear perspective with expressionistic effects. Many scenes come to mind: the murdered father’s wake, staged like the painting El requiem by Orozco; the singers on horseback playing their guitars, their song commenting on the story; the agitated crows in the climax of the film.

The handling of Dolores del Río is also very interesting: while her delicate features are enhanced by classic Hollywood lighting, the director guides her performance in a way that keeps her sensuality but obliterates the exoticism of her American career. The strong inner beauty the actress showed in Flor silvestre would become part of her screen persona from then on. (A case in point, Don Siegel’s Flaming Star (1960), where the actress is the feminine and resilient Kiowa mother of a brown-skinned Elvis Presley).