Vidalita is a 1949 Argentine historical romantic comedy film directed by Luis Saslavsky—who also wrote the story—with a screenplay by and dialogue by both, produced by the Emelco studio during the classical period of Argentine cinema. Set in 1830, it tells the story of a young woman who cross-dresses as a gaucho to be accepted by her grandfather, who longs for a grandson, and who in her male guise ends up making the captain of a fort fall in love with her. It stars Mirtha Legrand, Narciso Ibáñez Menta, and Fernando Lamas, for whom it was his last film in the country.
Conceived as a folkloric operetta in a mocking tone, the film was Saslavsky's only work for Emelco and the first in which he took on the criollista subject matter that the industry demanded of him, though he did so in order to parody it. With music of folkloric roots and a marked influence from the director Josef von Sternberg, Vidalita subverts the tropes of gaucho culture and hegemonic masculinity, and has been read as an inverted version of the gauchesque novel Don Segundo Sombra.
Vidalita was a box-office bomb and received poor reviews from most critics, who accused it of disrespecting national symbols. Saslavsky attributed that rejection to persecution by Peronism that, according to his account, led to his blacklisting and his subsequent relocation to Europe, though it is not clear whether that persecution actually occurred. Over time, the film was rediscovered and valued by critics as a transgressive work; its has been read as a veiled representation of male homosexuality within the limits of industrial cinema, and it has been considered a forerunner of queer cinema. In a 2022 survey of the 100 greatest films of Argentine cinema, the film ranked 51st.
Plot
In 1830, the young orphan Vidalita del Rosario arrives from Chuquisaca in Buenos Aires, in the midst of the Carnival celebrations, accompanied by two nuns from the convent where she was raised. She travels to meet her grandfather, Don Hilarión de Arzábal, a wealthy rancher from Buenos Aires Province who has summoned her by letter. Upon arriving, the maid Cruz warns her that Don Hilarión is convinced his grandchild is a boy: tired of living surrounded by women—his daughters and granddaughters—the old man longs at last for a man in the house. So as not to disappoint him, Vidalita decides to cross-dress and pass herself off as the grandson he expects. She thus receives Jerónimo de Torresillas, the grandfather's agent, who does not notice the deception.
Still in disguise, Vidalita mingles in the Carnival, where the captain Mariano Sucre mistakes her for a thief. When she takes refuge in her room and removes her disguise, the officer discovers her as a woman and is captivated by her eyes, without learning who she is. The next day, the young woman arrives at the ranch in her male role, welcomed with jubilation by Don Hilarión. With the help of Cruz, who accompanies her to protect her, she must learn the trades and manners of the gaucho—riding, breaking horses, behaving like a man of the countryside—and fend off the advances of her aunts and cousins, who court her believing her to be a man; her clumsiness gives rise to numerous comic entanglements.
Don Hilarión holds an old enmity with the neighboring fort and decides to provoke the Indigenous people himself, dragging Vidalita along on the expedition. The reprisal comes in the form of a . Amid the danger, captain Sucre reappears at the head of the troops; upon reuniting with the supposed grandson, he begins to recognize in his eyes those of the woman from the Carnival. During his stay at the house, in scenes charged with misunderstanding, the captain shares the room with Vidalita and confides to him his fascination with that stranger.
The foreman Laureano Sánchez betrays Don Hilarión and takes the ranch hands away to seize the estate, leaving the grandfather and the young woman at the mercy of another malón. To ask for help from the fort—whose gate does not open for any man—Vidalita dresses as a woman and presents herself as "Rosario", the supposed sister of the grandson, whom she gives up for dead. The captain comes to her aid. However, Don Hilarión is sentenced to be executed by firing squad for having provoked the Indigenous people, and Sucre offers to save him in exchange for marrying his granddaughter. To protect her grandfather, Vidalita agrees to keep up the deception and to let herself be courted.
During the wedding celebration, the entanglement breaks open when Laureano denounces her as a man in disguise. Vidalita then confesses that she has cross-dressed and ends up revealing the whole truth: she is the orphaned granddaughter who passed herself off as a man in order to win Don Hilarión's affection. Faced with the question of how to know whether she is a man or a woman, the story is resolved with the certainty that the captain will clear up that doubt on the wedding night.
Cast
Mirtha Legrand as Vidalita del Rosario de Arzábal Narciso Ibáñez Menta as Don Hilarión de Arzábal Fernando Lamas as Captain Mariano Sucre Amalia Sánchez Ariño as Cruz as Laureano Sánchez as Aunt Dolores as a countrywoman as Aunt Trinidad as a nun Analía Gadé as María de los Milagros as Sergeant Serapio Páez as María de la Asunción Ángel Laborde as a maid
Carlos Bellucci
Production and style
The production company Emelco, specialized in advertising and newsreel cinema and headed by the businessman , entered feature-film production in 1946—within the framework of the classical-industrial period of Argentine cinema—after acquiring the studios of the bankrupt Pampa Film. Emelco expanded Pampa Film's filming stages and incorporated modern equipment that made it one of the most sophisticated studios of the era; its first production was the comedy (1947), directed by Carlos Schlieper and starring Mirtha Legrand and Juan Carlos Thorry. However, in 1948 the company's collapse was precipitated when a government decree—then presided over by Juan Perón in his first term—banned advertising in cinemas, its main source of income. Emelco filmed with very high budgets to amortize the studio's re-equipment investments and, upon losing its advertising income, was forced to produce at ruinous costs. This led to the dismissal of hundreds of workers and Löwe's resignation from the presidency, leaving the company under bank control and with a reduced production schedule. Vidalita was one of the last films produced by Löwe before resigning from the company's presidency. In January 1949, the American magazine Variety reported that Emelco was finishing Vidalita and that the studio had recently become the property of the Central Bank, with Löwe, the company's former director, as general manager.
Luis Saslavsky occupied a complex place within Argentine cinema. He had trained in Paris and started out as a film critic and correspondent in Hollywood, and began his career as a director in the 1930s, at the height of the emergence of sound film and the accelerated industrial growth of the Golden Age, which gave rise to new debates about national cinema in which he also took part. Often criticized for his sophistication and for his attempt to emulate Hollywood in a foreignizing manner, Saslavsky shared in part the rejection by publications such as Cinegraf and intellectuals such as Jorge Luis Borges of the then-prevailing tango and arrabal cinema; however, he did not adhere to the criollista and nationalist alternative that those sectors proposed either—a cinema centered on the landscape of the interior and literary tradition—and, from a cosmopolitan position, kept his distance from both prescriptions. Vidalita was his only work for Emelco and the first film in which he gave in to incorporating the criollista subject matter that the industry had demanded of him, though he did so from a mocking perspective that ended up ridiculing it. The production had story and dialogue by Saslavsky, screenplay and dialogue by , cinematography by , and set design by . Legrand starred in it—her second and last film for Emelco—alongside a large cast that included Narciso Ibáñez Menta, Fernando Lamas, in his last film in Argentina, Amalia Sánchez Ariño, and .
Vidalita was conceived as a folkloric operetta in a mocking tone, with characters who speak in verse. According to , Saslavsky's idea was to "transplant the Spanish zarzuela to the pampa" and employ folkloric elements, as a reaction against the "false gauchismo" of other films set in rural settings. The film includes musical numbers, a , a , and a horse-breaking, with music by , Luis Gianneo, , and Sebastián Piana, and choreography by Antonio Barceló. Raúl Manrupe noted that, against a local tradition in which the musical was usually "linked to the tango" or to the imitation of the American model, Saslavsky proposed with Vidalita an "Argentine musical" of criollo roots. Di Núbila considered it the forerunner of a genre "full of possibilities" and "a forerunner worthy of study" of the musical comedy. Vidalita subverts the popular national imaginary built around the figure of the gaucho—rebellious, brave, and a symbol of manliness—and has been analyzed as an inverted version of the gauchesque novel Don Segundo Sombra (1926) by Ricardo Güiraldes. Whereas the novel is a coming-of-age tale in which a young man acquires from an old herdsman the knowledge and values that make him "a man" and discovers at the end that he is the heir to the ranch, in Vidalita the protagonist starts out as the presumed heir and, instead of a boy of uncertain origin, is a young woman unknown to her grandfather, who learns the gauchesque trades and values from him and from a foreman, only to end up mocking the supposed male superiority.
Vidalita is one of the films by Saslavsky in which the influence of the director Josef von Sternberg—whom he had interviewed in Hollywood and admired for his baroque style—appears most strongly. That influence is evident in the film's scenes of carnivals, dances, and masks, which serve Saslavsky to "hide plots and characters." From a narrative standpoint, Vidalita alters the usual chronological order of the classical model: it opens with a male voice-over that anticipates the story—"here begins the story of a very singular case, of the gaucho who was a girl betrothed to a soldier"—and with a flashback, while the protagonist introduces doubts about her identity ("how to explain why I wear women's clothing?"). According to , although this paradoxical beginning subverts the narrative stability of the model, the resolution ends up "clarifying and suturing" the ambiguity through the closing of the story by the narrator.
Release and initial reception