Maternal Identities and Abject Equivalence in Biutiful

Ensuing his visit to Spain in 1952, Hugh Trevor Roper declared himself to be "fascinated by that extraordinary, incongruous, accidental, isolated appendage to Europe" (Sisman, 200). Regarded as a laggard in modernization, this "isolated appendage", which had concealed and whitewashed its own painful past of emigration to Switzerland and Germany in the 1960s, became a host country to South American, Caribbean, and Moroccan immigrants in the post-millennial period.¹ The economic boom necessitated a huge increase in menial workers to fuel the buoyant construction and service industries, and consequently, by 2000, five million immigrants were employed in these sectors (Encarnación 407). For the most part, the cultural representation of this social phenomenon did not diverge from stereotypical, orientalist, and implicitly derogatory envisionings of female immigrants as the sexualized other, whose voracious sexuality tantalized and satiated the sexual appetites of lustful, and frequently violent, Spanish men. In Icíar Bollaín's 1999 film, Flores de otro mundo, the Cuban immigrant, Milady, is confined as the mistress of the local construction boss, Carmelo, while in Fernando León de Aranoa's 2005 film, Princesas, the Dominican prostitute Zulema, is sexually brutalized by a Spanish funcionario, who promises to legalise her citizenship. The denigration of immigrant females is reinforced by the pejorative framing of them in non-agentic, passive, caring roles that confirm, rather than contest, extant prejudices in Spanish society (Ballesteros 3). Their caring capacity is invested with transnational sexual prowess: in Almudena Grandes's 2007 novel, El corazón helado, the Carrión González's family's Dominican maid, Lisette, is the object of both the protagonist, Álvaro and his brother's, lasciviousness, which she further provokes by wearing skimpy bikinis and coquettishness. In all these cultural texts, the immigrant female body is exoticised, transmuting into the focus of Spanish male prurience, which, it is intimated, is incited by the promise of a primitive sexual euphoria, laden with colonial overtones. These hackneyed stereotypes elide female immigrant entrepreneurial success in sectors such as the beauty industry and catering in Spain, and, however unwittingly, convey a limiting vision of their human potential and their current and future contribution to Spanish society. In these films, the immigrant female's maternal qualities warrant the briefest of allusions, and their children only either briefly figure as angelic symbols of a harmonious transnational family in the Holy Communion scenes of Flores de otro mundo, or they are invoked as the object of remittances, and consequently, as the compellant of the mother's prostitution in films such as León de Aranoa's Princesas. Neither their own relationship with their children, nor their relationship with the children for whom they care, has been the subject of profound artistic attention.²

Alejandro González Iñárritu's 2010 film, Biutiful remedies this dearth of maternal representation by treating a large number of permutations of motherhood and some new variants as well. The film chronicles the redemptive quest of a dying fixer and spiritual medium named Uxbal to ensure his children, Ana and Mateo's welfare following his imminent demise.³ The film constitutes an intense engagement with transnational maternal sexuality, the role of the immigrant childminder in Spanish society, and the influence of advanced capitalism on affective relationships.⁴ The bipolarity of the Argentine biological mother, Marambra, renders her incapable of satisfactorily performing the maternal role, and consequently, her ex-husband Uxbal enters into primarily economic, and tangentially affective, relationships with two immigrant childminders, a Senegalese woman named Igé and a Chinese factory-worker named Lili, both of whom assume the role of quasi-mother figures. Innovatively, Biutiful's ostensible revalorisation of these female immigrants as a panacea to the fragmentation and abjection of the transnational Spanish family accords primacy and respect to the experience of immigrant childminding. In Biutiful, immigrant female childminders transmute into a source of salvation for Uxbal's troubled transnational Spanish family, beset by mental and physical illness, and mired in poverty. Throughout the film, a spiritual mother named Bea provides the motherless Uxbal with warmth and consolation, and her figure illuminates the specifically national genesis...