02 · 29 · 24

Amelia, Mariana and Narda o el verano: Juan Guerrero's adverse case

Rafael Aviña

They say the first credential for a student from that new and atypical education model that was the CUEC (Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos, currently ENAC), founded in 1963, was for Juan Guerrero Sánchez. He graduated with a degree in Architecture from UNAM and a master’s degree in Urbanism from La Sorbonne in Paris. Guerrero enrolled in the First Experimental Film Contest announced by the Technicians and Manuals Section of the Union of Workers of Cinematographic Production (STPC). The result was Amelia (1964), based on the story of the same name by Juan García Ponce. It was adapted by Ponce, Guerrero, and writer Juan Vicente Melo. 

Amelia took an emotional approach to one of the main topics in García Ponce’s literary work: the love impossibility of a couple after going through the stages of courtship and marriage that ends in estrangement, boredom, and moral abandonment —she, the actress and journalist Lourdes Guerrero, wife of the filmmaker himself, and he, Luis Lomelí—. His debut feature film turned out to be full of sensitivity and honesty, which is rarely achieved by our cinema, in which the concept of erotism comes before heartbreak. Featuring Alberto Dallal, Claudio Obregón, and Manuel González Casanova, former director of CUEC and Film Archive UNAM, amongst others. Amelia won the award for Best Soundtrack which was oversaw by Manuel Enríquez.

His narrative proposal, very much indebted to the new French wave of the time and the pursuit of a new sensuality with greater formal audacity, far from moralism, would culminate with Mariana (1967) —assisted by Alberto Bojórquez and Alfredo Gurrola— and Narda o el verano (1968). Based on the story of the same name by Inés Arredondo, adapted by her, García Ponce, and Guerrero, Mariana told another story of love impossibility and emotional fragility starring a beautiful and very sensitive Pixie Hopkin, told through a flashback that begins with Mariana's burial. As a teenager and student at a nuns' school, the young girl runs away with her boyfriend Fernando (Julio Aleman), awakening her father’s wrath. Her father sends her away to Switzerland for ten years. On her return to Culiacán, she is reunited with Fernando. They run away, get married, and have children. Sex is the main driving force that brings them together, but things get complicated between them due to Mariana's tendency to become engrossed in nature. During a walk by the sea, Fernando gets annoyed by his wife's fascination with the ocean. He beats her up brutally and she ends up almost dying in a hospital, and her parents manage to split them apart. He leaves and goes to a psychiatrist for help (Juan José Gurrola). Mariana looks for her husband in the city without any luck. When she goes back to Culiacán, she gets sucked into a long line of sexual encounters where she seeks Fernando’s sight in every man that approaches her. She ends up murdered in a little hotel by a travel agent with whom she has huge pleasure. Fernando pleads guilty to the tragedy and accepts a lobotomy to forget.

After this sensible story, Juan Guerrero filmed Narda o el verano, his third and last film. It was based on an interesting story by Salvador Elizondo. It involves a quirky European girl with two friends that go to Acapulco to party. 
Filming began a couple of days before the fateful October 2, 1968, and the plot focuses on that other youth of the moment: that of debauchery, unconsciousness, and erotic flirtation, with the exuberant blonde Amedée Chabot. Little remains of Elizondo's morose and sensual tale —in fact, Narda was a utopia —but this tragic love triangle, closer to Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1961), becomes a document of a particularly intense time for the young people of the time. It is, in fact, an existentialist story, as was Elizondo's beautiful tale, with literary and filmic references —Blow Up (1967), by Michelangelo Antonioni, for example— and in which he speaks of "eroticism and sex" as the driving force of a new generation.

The theme song was performed by Mona Bell and briefly featured Pixie Hopkin and Lourdes Guerrero, in the role of model Joyce Proust. There are undoubtedly some attractive erotic images, such as the striptease performed by Chabot in front of the astonished Max (Enrique Álvarez Félix) and Jorge, the voyeuristic photographer played by Héctor Bonilla. She moves to the rhythm of a jazz piece —the music is by Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras and the arrangements by Alicia Urreta—, and interrupts her dance when Bonilla takes a picture of her. Other scenes, such as the one in which Narda, in a tiny bikini, makes love aboard a sailboat on the high seas with Max, fleetingly showing her breasts and, later, has sex with Jorge —Max tells her: "you are a great whore"—, in a sexual and homoerotic triangle that will be recreated several decades later in titles such as Y tu mamá también (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2001), Así (dir. Jesús Mario Lozano, 2005), Drama / Mex (dir. Gerardo Naranjo, 2006) and Cumbia Callera (dir. René Villarreal, 2007). Juan Guerrero died of cancer in 1970 at the age of 34.