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  • Negotiating the Past: Early Modern Women in Spanish Films (1996–2010)
  • Esther Fernández Rodríguez (bio)
El perro del hortelano. Dir. Pilar Miró. Enrique Cerezo Producciones Cinematográficas S.A., 1996. DVD. €10–14.
Juana la loca. Dir. Vicente Aranda. Canal + España, 2002. DVD. €7–11.
La dama boba. Dir. Manuel Iborra. P.C. Flamenco Films, DeAPlaneta P.C., Belén Gómez P.C., 2006. DVD. €24.
La princesa de Éboli. Dir. Belén Macías. Antena 3 Films, 2010. DVD. €11–14.

Of the thirteen most successful Spanish films set in the early modern period and produced between 2000 and 2012 — those with a viewership of more than one million — over half of them feature a female protagonist who assumes a conventional social role.1 The tension and consequent negotiations between the heroine’s desires and the social impositions placed upon her by these conventions are a recurrent pattern in these films. The gender debates of more than five hundred years ago, revisited on the screen in the immediate present, therefore necessitate that the films’ early modern values be updated so that these visual narratives are not reduced to purely archaeological recreations of Spain’s distant past.

For stage director Ernesto Caballero, adapting classical works for present-day audiences requires “navigating delicately between the Scylla of my own condition as an individual in the twenty-first century, and the Charybdis of the historical and cultural context in which the work was written.”2 Although Caballero’s comments specifically address the process of adapting classical texts for the contemporary stage, they are equally meaningful for the screen. That is, the historical distance between the contemporary director/spectator and the [End Page 119] period in which the work was produced must be acknowledged and preserved by establishing connections that, however, do not obscure its original essence. This sensitive dialogue with the past implies a gradual training of the audience, for whom the adaptation should seem realistic and past values may become understandable and, in some cases, even justifiable (103).3

In the four films discussed here — Juana la loca [Mad Love]; La princesa de Éboli [The Princess of Éboli]; and the two filmed theatrical adaptations of Lope de Vega’s plays, El perro del hortelano [The Dog in the Manger]; and La dama boba [A Lady of Little Sense] — the directors have deliberately cast as their major protagonists modern “stars” with extensive careers and wide-ranging roles to their credit. The audience’s familiarity with these popular actors, who are known mostly for their contemporary roles, creates an aura around the protagonists that anchors them in the present and distances them from the films’ historical context.4 In what is as much a commercial as an aesthetic strategy, all four directors effectively transmit early modern values by means of the non-conformist attitudes of these modern actors, who, when playing their roles, break established gender expectations with varying degrees of success. Yet what characterizes the female protagonists’ modernity is not whether they prevail in their efforts to resist patriarchal strictures, but their awareness of women’s subordinate roles in early modern patriarchal society, which compels them to engage in struggles to become desiring subjects, subjects of authority, and free agents. [End Page 120]

Indeed, the films’ four protagonists all strive to become subjects of desire at the risk of endangering their lives and reputations. Perhaps the most obvious example is doña Ana de Mendoza, the Princess of Éboli, who adamantly defends her freedom to love without being held accountable to anyone, not even King Philip II:

PHILIP II:

Antonio Pérez is your lover?

PRINCESS:

Yes. Does that bother you? I’m a widow, Your Majesty. My father is dead and I do not have any brothers. Thank God I do not have to answer to any man.

PHILIP II:

Not even to me?

PRINCESS:

No, not even to you.

PHILIP II:

I am your king.

PRINCESS:

Yes, but you are not my owner. I decide whom I love, only I decide.

If, in reality, the princess dies incarcerated within her own palace by Philip II, her life on the screen, as conceived by the director Bel...

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