Cinema: "I tremble, oh matador" by Rodrigo Sepúlveda, alone in the arena
“I tremble oh matador”, by Rodrigo Sepulveda, adapted from the novel by Pedro Lemebel, “Tengo miedo torero”.
On screens in France from June 15, 2022. © Outplay Films
Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec
5 mins
We are in Santiago de Chile, in the mid-1980s, in the midst of a military dictatorship.
Director Rodrigo Sepulveda stages a baroque love story between a transvestite played by Alfredo Castro and a young revolutionary, Carlos.
A sensitive, political film and a new epiphany for the Chilean actor.
Advertising
Read more
Alfredo Castro is
La loca del frente
, the madwoman across from Doña Olguita's little grocery store, in a dark alley where the houses miraculously stand upright, supported by fragile wooden props.
He lives in a house that used to be bourgeois, but is now as dilapidated as the others, cracked everywhere, with sad walls and poor furniture.
A framework in the image of a country, Chile, which lives under the threat of the henchmen of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, and violent earthquakes.
We are in the 1980s, the street is agitated with demonstrations against the tyrant but
the loca del frente
stands apart from this turmoil.
She lives in her world, that of transvestites, cabarets, music from the 1930s and 50s, colored rags, passes in a cinema "for adults", of the "show".
Romanticism and politics combined in the present
A baroque universe in which
Alfredo Castro
excels, he who likes cinema to combine emotion and politics.
Rewarded with the prize for best actor for his interpretation at the Guadalajara film festival, he literally inhabits this character with unkempt red locks and torn clothes, capable of transforming himself into a vamp in a capeline with the turn of a toreador's cape.
The tired look underlined with a blue pencil, the sulky or greedy lips depending on the mood, and the tired wrinkles of the old transvestite are transformed when the "show" begins: "
reality scares me, I prefer the world of the night , from the stage
”, confides
the loca.
She falls in love with Carlos, a handsome young Mexican who asks her to keep mysterious boxes in her house.
"
I will be 'la doña', and you will be my Pedro Negrete
", teases
la loca,
a nod to Maria Felix, "
la doña
" and the actors Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante who shared the posters of the golden age of Mexican cinema... With Carlos,
the loca
comes out of the night, from the shadow of the leper's apartment to find the sun on the occasion of a picnic, a party anniversary with walls adorned with Cuban, Mexican and Chilean flags.
The loca
engages and the sun enters the house.
"I tremble ô matador" ("Tengo miedo torero" being the original title), a film by Rodrigo Sepulveda, with Alfredo Castro and Leonardo Ortisgriz in the main roles.
On screens in France from Wednesday June 15.
© Outplay Films
Operation Siglo XX
The Mexican actor Leonardo Ortisgriz is Carlos, a young revolutionary who arrived from Cuba to support the guerrillas of the Patriotic Front Manuel Rodriguez who will commit an attack - Operation Siglo XX, which has remained in the annals because it almost succeeded - against Augusto Pinochet in September 1986. Between the two characters establish a paradoxical relationship - one would like love when the other only wants to offer his friendship - with beautiful sequences of complicity and play when Carlos lets himself be carried away in the shows of
the loca
on
Tengo miedo torero
, a hit by Lola Flores.
Just as much as the colorful scarves and tablecloths embroidered by
the loca
on behalf of wives of putschist generals, the music contributes to the baroque atmosphere of the film, baroque like its main character.
“
There is no gay communist
”
“
Life will owe me the love story it invented for all the others
”.
Adapted from a work by Pedro Lemebel, the film - discovered at
Cinélatino in Toulouse last year
where it won several awards - and its characters also question the place of difference - in relation to the sexual norm in this case - in the marvelous world promised by Carlos the militant communist, who doubts his sexuality.
"
All the same, there's no more room for crazy women in your world than in this one
," La Loca retorts.
“
We don't give a damn who governs us, soldiers or communists, for them we'll never be anything but a bunch of tafioles!
If one day there is a revolution that includes madwomen, give me a sign... I will be there and in the front row
”.
Pedro Lemebel was "
an author and an extremely powerful and courageous gay LGBTQI activist
", explains Alfredo Castro who knew the writer and says that about fifteen years ago he had entrusted him with the role of
La Loca
. .
Lemebel was a rebel who wore makeup and wore high heels and used these provocations in macho and conservative Chile as a political weapon.
“
The fact is that Lemebel was very roughed up by the right, of course, but also by the Chilean left.
In the film,
says the actor who took part in writing the role and the screenplay,
there are a few passages of texts that I extracted, with the agreement of the director, from certain books by Lemebel and which retrace his attitude vis-à-vis the Chilean left, of which he was very critical.
The first time that Pedro Lemebel wore high heels, says Alfredo Castro again, was in 1986, during a meeting of left-wing activists.
The writer read his manifesto
I speak from / from the point of view of my difference
, in front of a dumbfounded assembly.
The film bears witness to this abyss as well.
Life for some is like the fight of a bullfighter, alone in the arena.
And this film is once again the occasion of a magnificent epiphany for Alfredo Castro.
“I tremble oh matador”, by Rodrigo Sepulveda, a love story between a transvestite (Alfredo Castro) who flees the political reality of a Chile under military dictatorship and Carlos (Leonardo Ortisgriz), a young internationalist revolutionary.
© Outplay Films
Newsletter
Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_EN
Chile
Movie theater
Culture
France