Cast: Assumpta Serna, Dominique Sanda
directed by Maria Luisa Bemberg
Runtime: 1 hour, 47 minutes, Year 1990
Genre: Foreign Films, Spanish Language
When an admirer asks Juana Ines de la Cruz, the 17th-century Mexican poet, scholar and nun, why she never wanted children, she points proudly to the tools of learning that surround her in the convent where she lives in comfort and is treated like a star.
"These are my children," she says, showing off her sundial, obsidian mirror, astrolabe, magnets, quill and telescope.
Her admirer (Dominique Sanda) happens to be the beautiful wife of the liberal Spanish viceroy (Hector Alterio) who rules Mexico. Until he is removed from his job and called back to Spain, Juana and the vicereine carry on a passionate but chaste love affair that inspires Juana to write some piercingly beautiful love poems.
The vicereine recognizes deep similarities in their situations. One entered a convent at 20; the other was married off at 20. One wears a veil, the other a crown. "Which of our worlds is more stifling?" she wonders.
Juana has an answer. "There is no prison for the soul," she replies loftily. She will live to eat her words.
Luminously portrayed by Assumpta Serna as a free-spirited genius spilling over with self-confidence and good humor, Juana is the shining feminist heroine of Maria Luisa Bemberg's film "I, the Worst of All ("Yo la Peor de Todas"), which opens today at the Walter Reade Theater. The New York premiere engagement of the 1990 film, which is to have 14 screenings through Sept. 29, is the centerpiece of the Argentine film series currently being presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
At once austere and hotblooded, the film follows Juana's persecution and destruction at the hands of the misogynic archbishop (Lautaro Murua) newly appointed to the Mexican colony. He is a man so reactionary that he is given to statements like "Satan found a refuge in the printed word." After attending a convent production of a comedy written by Juana that ridicules male chauvinism, he announces, "This is not a convent; it's a bordello."
The 17th-century world of the film is one of implacably opposed philosophies and religious fanaticism. The Spanish Inquisition is in full swing, and horror stories are circulating of people being rounded up and burned alive.
In the eyes of the archbishop, Juana's poetic gift is a Satanic curse and a courtly poem of adulation in which she expresses "a profound yearning to be enamored" evidence of "a morbid, lascivious sensuality." Once the viceroy and his wife return to Spain, she is without protection and doomed. It isn't long before she is denounced as one of the church's "rebellious daughters." Her books are burned, and after she has been tricked into writing a theological treatise that is used against her, she is expelled from the convent and compelled to work among plague victims. Her spirit crushed, she ends up signing a forced admission in her own blood that she is deserving of eternal damnation.
"I, the Worst of All" is an impassioned feminist cry drawn in a cinematic vocabulary that is both minimalist and Expressionist. As the characters move through semi-abstract settings, their haunted faces reveal their inner lives. With its many medium close-ups of clerics, nuns and aristocrats locked in debate, the film is a visually compelling portrait gallery of people caught in a war between rationalism and religious zealotry. The movie has deep erotic undercurrents. Sexuality and its suppression and distortion roil like personal earthquakes behind the characters' eyes.
The exception is Juana. She attains a kind of holiness, the movie implies, not through an abject spiritual devotion but through the light of her own intellectual fulfillment.
Not to be glib, but today is a very big day for movies about nuns. In addition to ``Dead Man Walking,'' which stars Susan Sarandon as the heroic Sister Helen Prejean, we also have the opening of ``I, the Worst of All,'' a poorly titled drama about a 17th century Mexican poet who becomes a nun in order to pursue her writing.
Based on ``The Traps of Faith,'' by Octavio Paz, which told the story of Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz, this intense, ultimately disappointing film was directed by the late Argentine film maker Maria Luisa Bemberg (``Camilla,'' ``I Don't Want to Talk About It'') in 1990. It played last June at the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival and opens its first Bay Area commercial run today at the Embarcadero Center Cinema.
Staged on spare studio sets with lavish costumes and theatrical lighting, ``I, the Worst of All''
(``Yo, La Peor De Todas'') resembles two films in its stylized austerity: ``Edward II,'' by the late British director Derek Jarman, and Carl Dreyer's silent classic, ``The Passion of Joan of Arc.''
Bemberg's film doesn't have the authority of Dreyer's, but it treats its martyred heroine with the same kind of holy reserve that Dreyer did. Played by Assumpta Serna, the femme fatale from Pedro Almodovar's ``Matador,'' Sister Juana comes across as a saintlike beacon of enlightenment -- a rare flower in the parched garden of colonial Mexico.
Staunchly devoted to her books and her writing, and more loyal to the world of ideas than to God, Sister Juana avoids the tyranny of Spanish colonialism by making her own world within the convent. There, she amasses an enormous library and describes her books and treasured objects -- quill, telescope, sundial, lyre and mirror -- as ``my children.''
A protofeminist in a nun's habit, Sister Juana is largely a mouthpiece for Bemberg's ruminations on the actual and spiritual imprisonment of women. ``Knowledge is always a transgression,'' Sister Juana says, ``especially for a woman.'' When she meets the handsome wife of a new liberal viceroy (Dominique Sanda), she builds a friendship based mostly on aesthetic appreciation, but also on sexual attraction.
It's Sanda who notes their similarities: ``You wear a veil and I wear a crown. You abide by the Rule and I by the Protocol. At 20 you entered the convent; at the same age I was married.''
Two prisoners, equally stifled by society? No, says the glassy- eyed Sister Juana, never anticipating the heavy door that is soon to drop on her.
The language in ``I, the Worst of All'' is gorgeous, and the actresses, particularly Serna, are appealing. Bemberg's intent is also admirable, and her basic theme -- that of women honoring the natural imperatives of curiosity and perception -- is valuable.
Still, Bemberg's effort is more thesis than film. Talky, stilted and claustrophobic, ``I, the Worst of All'' ends up sounding like a redundant dissertation on the long, shameful history of female disenfranchisement.
Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695) has been called by many the first great Latin American poet. Born an illegitimate child in Mexico, she taught herself to read when she was three years old and entered a convent at age 20. The early learning paid off when the leading scholars of the day tested her in a public examination, which she passed with flying colors. As a young lady-in-waiting in the Viceroy's Court, she continued to indulge her passion for learning.
This sensitive and artful glimpse of her life and work by director Maria Luisa Bemberg (I Don't Want To Talk About It) begins in 1680, when the viceroy of Spain (Hector Alterio) and a conservative archbishop (Lautario Murua) attend a play written by Sister Juana (Assumpta Serna). The man of God finds it lascivious whereas the cultured politician and his wife, the vicereine (Dominique Sanda), are quite taken with the drama. Knowing that the Church is cracking down on its perceived enemies, the vicereine offers Sister Juana her protection. The two women become friends and share a feeling of sadness over the terrible treatment of their sex by men in power.
Thanks to a liberal abbess at the convent, Sister Juana is able to meet with the leading writers and scholars of the day, all of whom hold her in high regard. Her large library, one of the best in the Americas, is filled with volumes not readily available to the general public. The talented nun also teaches music and does accounting work for the convent. When the vicereine gives birth to a son after losing three babies, Sister Juana rejoices with her. Then the poet and playwright shows her friend her own �children� � her telescope, her lyre, and her books � but notes, "It is a hard path without sweetness." Perhaps that is why the tender love she has for the vicereine lights up her life and makes her feel even closer to God.
I, The Worst of All is based on Mexican Nobel Prize-winning author Ocatavio Paz's book Sor Juana, or Traps of Faith (1988). Director Bemberg, who died in 1995, uses shadows, cloister bars, and sparsely lit scenes to convey the precariousness and loneliness of this brilliant nun whose creativity brings her under fire by the woman-hating archbishop. His power plays lead to several forays against Sister Juana, who is open to attack once the vicereine returns to Spain. The new abbess turns against her, as does her long loyal confessor. Both are convinced that pride has gotten in the way of her service to God as a nun. The shattering finale depicts the process whereby the Church seeks to reform Sister Juana and break her spirit. I, the Worst of All is another important entry into the growing number of films about women and their struggles with the Catholic church hierarchy.
On the opening scroll of the DVD, these words by Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz give a sense of her exquisite poetry:
I am not who you think I am.
But you have given me
Another being with your pens
Another breathe through your lips
And unlike my own self
I wander among your poems
Not as I really am
But as you want me to be.
IN 17TH century Mexico, a girl with a good brain had little hope of pursuing intellectual interests or a literary career. For a girl who wanted to write poetry more than marry and have children, the convent was the only possible refuge.
Thus Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz (Assumpta Serna, the daring heroine of Pedro Almodovar's "Matador" ) found herself a nun known for her poems, her plays and her intellect. Maria Luisa Bemberg's 1990 film, "I, the Worst of All," is an adaptation of Octavio Paz's "The Pitfalls of Faith," about Sister Juana's fight against the repressive forces of Catholicism in Spain and its colony, Mexico.
Sister Juana, born a peasant, became one of the great poets of the Spanish language. This meant nothing at the time to conservative leaders of the Catholic church who remained set on burning her books and forcing Juana to renounce her writings and live humbly like the other nuns.
As shown in the movie, for a while, Juana has a powerful protector in Maria Luisa (Dominique Sanda), wife of the Spanish viceroy in charge of Mexico. An attraction between them grows into intimacy, but the viceroy is recalled and Juana is left vulnerable to intra-church machinations.
Serna's luminous beauty shines forth from behind her habit. She gives a quiet, knowing performance, an interesting contrast to her unforgettably fiery and funny work in "Matador."
But the movie, at nearly two hours, seems never-ending. After a while, I realized that nearly every scene began with at least several seconds of stillness - no movement and no talking - as if Bemberg started the cameras rolling but forgot to say "action" right away. This gives the movie an unfortunate slow-witted feeling. You start to feel as if the actors, the writers and the director are all just a bit less sharp than you'd like.
When, at the beginning of Maria Luisa Bemberg's superb "I, the Worst of All," the archbishop of Mexico (Lautaro Murua) and the viceroy of Spain (Hector Alterio), both newly appointed, toast harmonious relations between church and state, you just know it's not going to last. After all, this is the 17th Century, when the Inquisition was in full force, and the archbishop proves to be as religiously fanatic as the viceroy is worldly.
The really serious, inevitable clash, however, is not in fact going to be between these two men but between the archbishop and a singular young woman, Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz (Assumpta Serna), who entered her convent at age 20, persuaded by her priest that a life as a nun would not be incompatible with a life as an intellectual.
With a kindly, open-minded abbess supporting her, Sister Juana has had it her way: holding a singing class for children, tending to the convent's accounts but spending most of her time in her garret library--considered the finest in the Americas at the time--studying and writing the poetry that would rank her among the greatest poets of Spain's Golden Age. Her abbess sees her as the pride of the convent, but the woman-hating archbishop sees her activities as evidence of "scandalous dissipation."
Not helping matters in the long run is that Sister Juana, apparently latently lesbian, has captivated the beautiful new vicereine (Dominique Sanda), who sees both of them imprisoned by the rigid proscriptions placed upon women at the time. The very existence of their friendship flouts convention, but as long as the viceroy's tour of duty lasts Sister Juana is safe.
Initially, the beautifully designed "I, the Worst of All," adapted from a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Octavio Paz, bristles with a spirit of feminism and has us pondering its inescapable implications for the Roman Catholic Church of today: What of the status of its women, of freedom of expression and intellectual pursuit or, for that matter, the plight of Mexico's poor?
But just as we're sure that Sister Juana is headed for a burning at the stake, Bemberg takes us into the heart of the Catholicism's enduring paradox: What the Church does to Sister Juana is abominable in its closed-mindedness and virulent misogyny but in doing so it provides her with the kind of testing that results in an astounding spiritual redemption. "I, the Worst of All" is charged with an ambiguity and an irony that is electrifying. Well-supported by Sanda, Alterio and others, Serna is, as always, a fine actress; here she give us a portrayal of the kind of range, passion and intelligence that is demanded in portraying Joan of Arc.
Bemberg's "I, the Worst of All" has proved to be the fitting valedictory for one of the most unusual careers in film; actually, "I Don't Want to Talk About It," an extraordinary fable of unexpected love starring Marcello Mastroianni, was the last of her six films. In her 40s the elegant Maria Luisa Bemberg turned her back on her life as a rich Argentine aristocrat to turn to filmmaking, making her directorial debut at 58. Each of her films, all of them feminist, but not militant in spirit, reflected her rapid maturity as an artist. The late U.S. arrival of "I, the Worst of All" (1990) allowed Bemberg, who died in May of cancer at 73, to leave us with a masterpiece.
One
very worth your attention is Maria Luisa Bemberg's 1990 film biography of the celebrated 17th C. Mexican nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz entitled "I, The Worst of All." I saw this picture for before, about four years ago while I was visitng Cuba, and while it's true that at that performance the one brief kiss exchanged between Sor Juana (Assumpta Serna)and the Vicereine (Dominique Sanda) evoked shocked reactions from some members of the Havana audience, the fact that this film, now with subtitles, is showing up all over the country in gay film festivals is a bit surprising to me. While Sor Juana and the Vicereine undoubtedly were in love with one another and Sor Juana wrote adoring love poetry to her and wore her picture around her neck, we do not know if they were ever lovers in a physical sense (the film implies they were not).
"I, The Worst of All" has much to offer. Based on Mexican Nobel Prize- winning author Octavio Paz's book Traps of Faith, the film makes use of flashbacks within a somewhat complicated plot structure to present the details of Sor Juana's life from her apparently illigitemate birth in 1648 to her death from the plague in 1695. Much of the dialogue that Sor Juana speaks in the film is taken directly from her writings which include not only poetry, but letters, plays, and philosophical and theological writings as well.
What emerges is the picture of a young girl who taught herself to read at three and who, from an early age, was determined to do all that she could possibly do to lead a life in pursuit of knowledge. Her childhood solution was that she would dress up as a man and attend the university when she grew up. When her mother sent her to live with rich uncles in Mexico City she had the opportunity to gain prodigious knowledge and was even subjected to a public examination conducted by the leading scholars of her day--in which she fielded all the questions put to her. As a young lady-in-waiting in the Viceroy's court, she was pressured to participate in social life and to receivethe attentions of courtiers, which distracted her from her passion for learning. Since she was adamant that she would not marry and have children, and since a career as an academic was closed to her, she entered the convent, convinced by her confessor that there would be no incompatibility between religious life and her insatiable passion for knowledge and writing. And indeed, there was none, at first. Her fame as a writer and scholar grew and extended to Spain and beyond. She held what amounted to a literary and scholarly salon in her convent rooms where she kept the largest library in the New World and the latest in scientific instruments, gifts from her admirers..
But Sor Juana was caught up in the power struggles between Mexico's the secular rulers, the Viceroys sent from Spain to be the secular rulers of Mexico, and the ecclesiastical ruler the Archbishop during the age of the Inquisition. When the new Viceroy and his wife "adopt" Sor Juana and protect her, the fanatically misogynistic new Archbishop pursues his agenda of reforming the convents and of breaking Sor Juana's spirit, forcing her, in the end, to renounce all that she held dear and to declare, in blood, that she was "the worst of all."
�Get thee to a nunnery.� Such might have been the thinking of some smart women of yore, women seeking a safe haven to pursue a life of the mind, a life unfettered from the imperatives of marriage and motherhood, a life devoted to study and artistic endeavors which could only be interrupted by vespers and the occasional self-flagellation. In Yentl, Barbra Streisand's young character donned male rabbinical drag in order to follow her educational goals. Here, in this historically set true story I, the Worst of All, Juana Ines de la Cruz (Serna) dons nun attire in order to pursue her intellectual aims after being denied entry into the �men only� domain of the university. Based on the book The Traps of Faith by Octavio Paz, this 1990 film by Argentinean director Maria Luisa Bemberg takes place in 17th-century �New Spain� (Mexico) as the progressivism of the European Renaissance is giving way to the horrendous repressions of the Spanish Inquisition. Juana is truly one of the intellectual lights of her time: She is an accomplished playwright and poet, the possessor of scientific tools and an extensive library maintained within the convent walls, the celebrated star of the convent and much-visited mentor to �outside� intellectuals. Beloved by the Spanish viceroy and vicereine (Sanda) who govern the area, Juana receives their protection and patronage. And between Juana and the vicereine runs an undercurrent of special admiration and physical desire that, though repressed by modern standards, certainly transgresses the proprieties of the time. Sanda, who has lent her bold yet understated sexual fire to many a film (The Conformist, 1900) is compellingly cast against the physical intensity of Serna's (Matador) piously robed form. When a new, woman-hating archbishop takes over the territory, Juana's royal protectors can no longer help her and the heavy hand of repression squelches her intellectual pursuits. Why, it's enough to cause a girl to question her faith. Though I, the Worst of All discloses a fascinating slice of feminist history, it too often proceeds with the same staid sobriety that commonly mars historical film dramas. Also, the points the film makes about the inherent misogyny of the religious/political system and the grievous injustices it causes are restated often and far too repetitively. Yet, stories about women who, no matter the century, buck the �system� are far too infrequent to be ignored.