Mexico may have been in the throes of a swine-flu scare. But that didn’t keep one of its leading writers, Angeles Mastretta, from attending last night’s USA Film Festival showing here of a film called Arrancame La Vida (Tear This Heart Out), which was based on her 1985 novel. Indeed, Mastretta said she holed herself up in her Mexico City home for a week before coming to Dallas, taking no chances with the outbreak. She joined the flick’s director, Roberto Sneider, for a Q&A at the Angelika Film Center following Arrancame‘s regional premiere and, later, for a packed reception at the Sunnybrook Lane home of Harry and Cristina Lynch. Jump to learn how the writer (pictured) and director gently tussled during the evening over the cultural implications of machismo, one of the flick’s central themes.
Mastretta’s book and the movie tell a love story set in Mexico’s post-revolutionary period (the 1930s and ’40s).
It’s centered on a beautiful, free-spirited heroine (Catalina) who marries a ruthless, authoritarian general/politician (Ascensio), but later falls for a sensitive musician type (Vives) who’s also a left-wing agitator.
Mastretta, it seemed, was a little amused by Sneider’s filmed portrayal of the macho general.
The director “was more in love with the general than with the prince,” the writer told the Q&A crowd at the Angelika, chiding Sneider with a smile. “I know that he’s a strong character, and you men like him so much.”
In reply, the director said he had to make the thuggish Lothario sympathetic–funny, seductive, charismatic–in order to render the movie believable.
“He has a lust for life, and a power. He’s a guy who knows how to enjoy life, to have fun,” along with his horrible side, Sneider said. “He could not be a monster, or we would lose respect for [Catalina].
“As Mexican men we … all have a little Ascensio in us.”
Premiered here in cooperation with The Mexico Institute–and its founding director, Clara B. Hinojosa–Arrancame cost $6 million to make and was Mexico’s foreign-language film submission for the 2008 Academy Awards. (It wasn’t nominated, but finished in the top nine.)
The USA Film Festival continues today and tomorrow.
