02 · 14 · 22

MUCHACHAS DE UNIFORME: the first major sexual diversity film

Rafael Aviña

Before the 1960s, the treatment of sexual diversity in Mexican cinema was practically unthinkable. Therefore, a film like Muchachas de uniforme, made in 1950 and rescued from a Berlin film archive by the UNAM Film Archive, which celebrated its 48th anniversary in July 2008, attracts powerful attention. Directed by Alfredo B. Crevenna, the film manages, together with Fernando de Fuentes' La casa del ogro (1938) and its openly gay bachelor character played by Manuel Taméz, to propose the greatest precedent of clear lesbian connotations ever seen in Mexican cinema.

Indeed, it is an exceptional work, due to the intensity of its treatment of sexual plurality, subtle and direct, inspired by the play by the German Christa Winsloe, which inspired several versions such as the German film Mädchen in Uniform (1931), by Leontine Sagan. The boarding school for young girls where the action of the play takes place is replaced by a school of nuns directed by the severe Mother Concepción (Rosaura Revueltas), who has a limp in one leg. There, the young and shy orphan Manuela, played by the Polish-Brazilian Irasema Dilián in her first Mexican film, who at 16 can neither read nor write, begins to feel an enormous devotion that turns into a passionate romantic love for the teacher Lucila (Marga López), who takes her as her protégée.

Muchachas de uniforme premiered at the Mexico Cinema on May 31, 1951, with a two-week run, and practically disappeared from the billboard and suffered censorship in its brief exhibition on television. The film, adapted by Edmundo Báez and Egon Eis, opens with a blunt biblical warning: “He who is free from guilt, let him cast the first stone”, and is set in an elaborate and whimsical scenographic environment by the great Edward Fitzgerald, as an allegory of the tortuous and twisted repressive environment of the convent -example of this, the constant genuflections that the young girls have to do for the nuns-.

The film is a real treasure due to a series of truly unusual details. The fact that the men who "appear" do so through voice-over (the case of Ernesto Alonso, Lucila's fiancé), or through shadows (the priest played by Antonio Bravo) gives the film a special dimension. A closed and claustrophobic female universe, pulsating and intense, where the common places of the gossipy student (Alicia Rodríguez), the joker fascinated with men (Anabelle Gutiérrez), the young girl secluded by her parents to avoid her boyfriend (Alicia Caro), or the arrogant show-off (Patricia Morán) all come together.

It also includes unusual characters such as Mother Superior Josephine (Maria Douglas), who shows a subtle amorous-sexual exaltation for Lucila, the lay teacher who goes from coldness to gentleness in relation to Manuela, a young girl who is only looking for a little affection and who turns out to be like the “sensitive” plant  (“everything hurts her and she takes refuge in herself”) and who ends up deeply in love with her teacher, as shown in her exalted interpretation of Quo Vadis in which she seems to confess her love in the middle of the theatrical performance, to the displeasure of the Mother Superior.

That scene in which Manuela asks Lucila for forgiveness on her knees, wrapping her arms around Lucila's legs and hips; the phrase uttered by the latter: "Say it, Mother, that she is in love with me? "or the supposedly moralistic ending, in which the teacher Lucila decides to take the habits after the sacrifice of her lover, and whose hair falls on the grave of the young woman as a last act of love, turn Muchachas de uniforme into an unprecedented, brave and unusual film, giving it a dignified and radical subversive position.

Translated by Adrik Díaz