|
Article Excerpt
According to Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space, the house, or the abode, provides one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind. (1) In the film Miss Mary, the Argentine director, Maria Luisa Bemberg, utilizes the space of the estancia to represent the national, cultural, and social values of her nation, especially those pertaining to women, during the 1930s and '40s. Interweaving her own memories with those of the protagonist, the British governess, Miss Mary Mulligan, who had come to Buenos Aires in 1938 to take care of an estancia owners' three children, Bemberg reconstructs the era's patriarchal norms, the Argentine upper class's conservative politics and penchant for all things British including the English language, and the period's political upheavals including the rise of Juan Peron, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II.
The space of the estancia, Miss Mary's Buenos Aires apartment, and the church of St. Ignatius, also in Buenos Aires, where the youngest child Terry's wedding is to take place, serve to link the present (1945) with the past (1938), as well as contrast the rural and the urban way of life. After an initial historical note in which Bemberg informs the viewer that in 1930's Buenos Aires, General Uriburu overthrew the legitimate government of President Irigoyen and remained in power for the next fifteen years through fraud and coercion, she projects a series of black and white photos of famous people and events of the era accompanied by its musical hits which serve as a frame for the story.
The repressive values of Uriburu's regime filtered down into all layers of Argentine society, and especially to its women and mothers, as evidenced by the lifestyle and rituals of the Martinez-Bordagain family, whom we meet in a short introductory vignette, and in a series of flashbacks that Miss Mary, played impeccably by Julie Christie as very civilized, self-controlled, and distant (Fontana 36), has in her apartment and in the church while waiting for the youngest daughter Terry's wedding to begin. The family life on the estancia, as remembered by Miss Mary, is in reality a "work of memory"(Kearney 6) for the director Bemberg through which she seeks to reconcile with her own loss of childhood innocence and with the loss of her political ideal of freedom for Argentina and for women and mothers in general. Through the characters of the governess Miss Mary, the mother Mecha (who together comprise a type of schizophrenic motherhood), and the two daughters, Bemberg seeks to revisit her identity and its changes through time, and also to preserve her selfhood when confronted by the Other, i.e., the patriarchy, represented by the male characters of the estancionero, Alfredo, his son Johnny, and his brother-in-law Ernesto. The film, in Bemberg's words, is "a fresco of an epoch I knew personally. There are many parts in which I show ..." (Bach 23). Throughout the film's dialogue, Bemberg concomitantly alludes to the acts and events of violence of the era, such as the suicide of the poet Leopoldo Lugones, and the demonstrations in favor of Peron, which...
|
