12 · 07 · 21

Meche Carreño, the great erotic myth

Rafael Aviña

At the end of the sixties, two figures would emerge that would have a great impact on the collective unconscious, in a particularly transgressive era: Isela Vega and Meche Carreño, enormous erotic myths of that time, that the cinema, the press, television and their followers would turn into legends, during those years of social and political repression. Unlike the voluptuous Isela, Meche Carreño (María de las Mercedes Carreño Nava), born in Minatitlán, Veracruz, in 1947, was rather petite, with the body of a teenager. A young woman with beautiful lips, slender legs and long hair, she had the audacity to be portrayed in a monokini, thus becoming a fashion and film luminary. Meche studied at Andrés Soler's Acting Academy, collaborated with Alejandro Jodorowsky in a theatrical production and with Carlos Ancira in the play El hombre y su máscara, and married businessman and photographer José Lorenzo Zakany Almada, who launched her to stardom in the sixties.

 

A plot of daring nudity, situations of enormous violence and sexual tension was Emilio Fernández's La choca (1973), in which Meche has a beautiful nude performance and alternated with Pilar Pellicer, in a story of extreme passions in the Oaxacan jungle, with which both actresses won the Ariel for best co-acting and starring performance, respectively. Written by the talented Josefina Vicens “La Peque”, Francisco del Villar's Los perros de Dios (1973) united the beautiful Helena Roja and Meche Carreño in a story about sexual and religious obsession.

In the seventies, Meche Carreño's nudes were more explicit, as shown in Indio Fernández's Zona roja (1975). However, the best of Carreño's filmography is to be found in the work she made with the sensitive filmmaker Juan Manuel Torres, her sentimental partner after her divorce from Zakany. At his side, he starred in a series of intelligent stories whose themes were the intimate confessions and sentimental aspirations of the young people of the time as shown in: La otra virginidad (1974), La vida cambia (1975), El mar (1976) and La mujer perfecta (1977). Sensitive works with a strong erotic charge, which tried to polemicize about the hypocrisies of a prudish and repressed society in which Carreño appeared in strong and provocative situations.

In La otra virginidad (Ariel Award for Best Film), two young waitresses (Leticia Perdigón and Meche) have a relationship with Valentín Trujillo and Arturo Beristáin: one is a movie delivery boy whose father, a retired military man (Víctor Manuel Mendoza), treats him harshly. La vida cambia tells the story of the passionate triangle between Carreño, who works in a beauty salon, his partner, an unemployed aspiring actor (Beristáin) and his younger sister (Maritza Olivares).

El mar touches on themes such as abortion, incest and infidelity with Carreño as a beautiful pregnant photographer. Finally, the last film with erotic elements of Meche Carreño would be La mujer perfecta: here, she is a very successful dancer and film actress of humble origin, married to a rich and jealous industrialist. Still active, Meche would still appear in films such as: Tres historias de amor, El Noa Noa, Es mi vida, Durazo, la verdadera historia and El día de las sirvientas.

Translated by Adrik Díaz