The Latino Film Festival's got it bad

By Chet Williamson

This year's Latino Film Festival is tagged with the theme mal de amores, which loosely translates to "love sickness." In explaining its meaning, Dolly Vazquez of Centro Las Americas, whose organization sponsors the event, says, "There's a saying in Spanish; it's like when somebody is suffering from jealousy you say, ‘tienes mal de amores y celos pasma'os!' Meaning, that the person has love sickness. And, "celos pasma'os" is like dumb-found jealousy."

All four selections in this, the 13th annual festival, suffer from this affliction. They are El Cimarrón, Mal de amores, No sos vos, soy yo and Una de rosa de Franciao.

In his accompanying notes, festival director and Clark Prof. Marvin D'Lugo states that the theme was inspired by and chosen from the showcase film, Carlitos Ruiz Ruiz's Mal de amores.

"Love sickness," he says, is the "impetus for one of the richest currents of Hispanic literary and cinematic creativity. From Don Quixote's pining for Dulcinea to such diverse standards of Latin American literature as Pablo Neruda's Veinte Poemas de Amor to Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and Angeles Mastretta's recent harlequin romance, appropriately titled Mal de amores, love sickness has long been a popular staple plotline for Latin American story-tellers."

Mal de amores tells the story of Ismael (Luis Guzmán) who loves his wife Lourdes, but he's also smitten with Tati, Lourdes's cousin. D'Lugo says with the support of executive producer Benicio del Toro, the film is a bittersweet comedy about the eternal matching and mismatching of lovers of all social classes and ages that any audience can relish. "Beautifully photographed and edited," he adds, "U.S. critics have already named Mal de amores as one of the best films ever made in Puerto Rico."

El Cimarrón is a love story about a young African couple that takes place in the slavery era at the turn of the nineteenth century. Violently seized from their African homeland, these youngsters arrived in chains in crowded, sweltering cargo holds aboard Spanish vessels destined to a Caribbean island to be sold as slaves.

The film was directed by Iván Dariel Ortiz. "We previously screened his debut film, Héroes de otra patria [Heroes of Another Country], which is unique in Caribbean cinema," says D'Lugo. "Set in Puerto Rico, the film makes a clear link between colonial history and the contemporary political status of the island. This is a story about the struggle for freedom and independence, but it is also, importantly, a tender love story splendidly told through striking photography and powerful acting."

The Spanish-Cuban co-production, Una rosa de Francia, sets the stage for its love story in a brothel located in pre-Castro Cuba. This modern romance is also a bittersweet fairytale of love and loss set in a stylized Cuba. It's a place inhabited by virgins, madams and sailors, where true love triumphs over arranged marriages. The film takes its title from a song sung by the great Cuban vocal stars of the ‘50s like Benny More and the soundtrack wonderfully evokes the era. "As the dialect of its original Spanish-language title suggests, No sos vos, soy yo is an Argentine entry in this series but with an intriguing U.S. Latino link to Orlando, Florida, the amorous Disneyworld of Latino passion gone awry," D'Lugo notes.

It tells the story of Javier, the walking manifestation of a character out of an early Woody Allen movie. He constantly pesters his friends, family and shrink about his ex-girlfriend. Finally, Javier meets Julia. "What began as a tale of a jilted lover becomes a hilarious "shaggy-dog story," says D'Lugo. "Juan Taratuto's debut film shows a talent for hilarious comedy mixed with real pathos."

In speaking of the notion of love sickness, D'Lugo also notes that generations of audiences have been weaned on the variations of plots that borrow liberally from the early Mexican musical, Allá en el Rancho Grande (Over at the Big Ranch), the first Latin American movie blockbuster of the 1930s, with its serenading mariachis as background to the story of childhood sweethearts who become star-crossed-lovers. "Just as ‘love sickness' has provided the dramatic and comic ingredient for novels and movies," D'Lugo says, "it has also kept that quintessential Latino art form, the ‘telenovela,' alive and well to the delight of audiences worldwide." o