TEAR THIS HEART OUT (ARRANCAME LA VIDA)
(Mexico, 2009, d. Robert Sneider)
Based on a popular Mexican novel, and with a song that is sung towards the end of the film when the lyrics clearly indicate the life of the central character, this nationalist and feminist drama was one of the five final contenders for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, 2008.
It is quite a lavish production, considered one of Mexico's most expensive. It recreates life in that country in the 1930s and 40s with attention to design, costumes, sets and a sense of period, also with the music and songs.
At the centre is a very strong young woman, Catalina. As played by Ana Claudia Talencon (the star of The Crime of Fr Amaro), she has to age from 15 to 30, an uneducated but shrewd girl who is seduced by a violent and ruthless general from the Revolution but who is a match for him at every step of their marriage and his career as politician, governor of the state of Puebla and minister in Mexico City. She has a lot to learn when she accompanies the general to the ocean and then has to learn about sexuality, when she agrees to his brusque command to marry him, when she is pregnant and discovers his infidelities, when he makes her a minister for health care and she takes it seriously and listens to complaints about him. She decides at times to leave but does not. She knows she can do better things for people, but she doesn't. She falls in love with an orchestra conductor but, of course, it is ill-fated.
Nevertheless, as the film ends and she still has much of her life before her, all kinds of possibilities and freedom open up. She has triumphed in self-assertion in a macho culture.
The film plays like a lower-key saga because most of the violence in politicking and destruction of enemies takes place off screen because the story is that of Catalina. He cruel husband is the supporting character.
While the action takes place rather rapidly and the film is not overlong, we still get a sense of the crises that Mexico went through during this period as well as experience of a woman who is something of a Scarlet O'Hara survivor of her day.
