Cross-dressing and Lesbian Representation in Belle Époque by Fernando Trueba

The Oscar-winning film Belle Époque (1992), directed by Fernando Trueba, systematically deconstructs patriarchal forms of masculinities by mocking the “Iberian macho” stereotype, by representing actively desiring women, and by allegedly making the male protagonist the object of the female gaze. The inversion of traditional gender roles throughout the film reaches its peak at the carnival cross-dressing sequence, when Violeta, dressed as a male soldier, aggressively seduces Fernando, dressed as a maid, and maintains total control over the love-making process. However, as I will demonstrate in this article, this seemingly subversive reversal of sexual identities is superficial and, in fact, reinstates the traditional vision of patriarchal dominance over the submissive female gender. While taking into consideration Teresa de Lauretis’s concept of “sexual indifference,” according to which the representation of sexuality in film and literature occurs only from the male perspective, I will explain how Trueba reproduces this perspective, which Paul Julian Smith calls “a traditional gendered division of roles and spectator positions” (182) of classical film, albeit with a unique nuance. As such, the viewer of Belle Époque is guided toward identifying with the male gaze, even when, as in the scene I consider, the subject of desire is a lesbian.

Belle Époque is a comedy that takes place between the December 1930 attempted military uprising against the monarchy and the proclamation in April 1931 of the Second Republic. Fernando deserts from the army and ends up in a rural house inhabited by Manolo and his four beautiful daughters: Clara, Rocío, Violeta, and Luz. One by one the four women seduce Fernando, who in the end marries the youngest, Luz. Trueba portrays this period of time in a utopian mode, configured as “an oasis of freedom, pleasure and uninhibited sexual experimentation” (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 59), in which the upcoming Republic appears as a paradisiacal space capable of erasing a complex and problematic historical moment. Likewise, José F. Colmeiro thinks that the utopian spirit of the film reveals a fundamentally conservative ideology because, rather than confronting the ideological conflicts of the past, it is reduced “to an escapist wish fulfilment devoid of a truly subversive value” (131).

Despite their criticism of the escapist aspect of the film, these critics do identify a subversive element in Trueba’s representation of feminine desire. This view is based principally on the film’s carnival sequence, which develops as follows. At the costume ball, Violeta is dressed as a soldier, while Fernando arrives as a maid in a costume that the four sisters have forced him to wear. When an old man, who thinks that Fernando is a woman, molests him, Violeta rushes to “rescue” Fernando and hits the old man with a bottle, after which she escapes with Fernando while holding his hand. Fernando then loses his shoe, and Violeta picks it up and puts it back on while caressing his leg, in an obvious parody of Cinderella’s loss of her shoe. Fernando tells Violeta, “Te has portado como un tío de verdad,” to which Violeta replies, “Es que lo soy.” The couple reaches the outskirts of the village, and Violeta, with exaggerated gestures of a macho seducer, forces Fernando to go up to a hayloft. Fernando’s demeanor is submissive, and Violeta aggressively silences his weak protestations. She pushes him down on a pile of hay and sits on top of him. Then she starts a sexual act in which she controls all the movements while he is forced to remain passive. When she is about to reach her orgasm, Violeta grabs the bugle (which is Fernando’s, since the army uniform she is wearing is the one he brought in his suitcase) and tries to blow it, but she cannot, so Fernando gives her instructions until she finally succeeds in making it blast while she has her orgasm as the sequence ends.

This scene has been generally interpreted as a powerful inversion of the representation of women as objects of desire and of the male gaze in classical film. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, for...