CHAVELA VARGAS MOVIE MOVIE
Kahlo’s diaries suggest love unrequited by Vargas but the singer refused throughout her life to speak of those days.Ī Vargas-Kahlo relationship, however, was brilliantly fictionalised in the Oscar-winning movie Frida (2002), in which the real Vargas, then aged 81, appears as a figure of Death to the young Frida, played by Salma Hayek, Vargas hauntingly singing one of her most famous songs, “La Llorona” (the Woman who Weeps). After the painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo took her into their home in Coyoacan, the artistic hub of Mexico City, the bisexual Kahlo and Vargas became close. Vargas might never have sung her way into the Mexican and Latin psyche had she not been taken under the wings of many of the great artists of the mid-20th century, including the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the great bolero songwriter Agustin Lara whose works she later performed. When she sang ranchera, or cowboy, songs, traditionally sung by men, she never did what most women singers tend to do – change the pronouns from “she” to “he.” Male artists assumed she was being faithful to the original lyrics. “What hurt was not being homosexual, but what they threw in my face, as if I had the plague,” she wrote. Being gay was against the laws of the land, and of the church, and she formally “came out” only in an autobiography when she was 80. While a similar image has since become common among gay female performers, Vargas was an outlaw. With her male hairstyle and wearing trousers beneath her jorongo (poncho), no one knew who she really was. But they knew she was, the bottle of tequila by her side replaced as swiftly as it was drained. When she appeared on stage in the 1950s with a bullwhip and a pistol, the audience was never sure whether the gun was loaded. In her own words, she was “una rareza,” a rarity, a one-off. Indeed, like Brel, Piaf, Dylan or the great bluesmen, her 80 albums transcended her own language, transposing Spanish lyrics into the universal language of love, loss, pain and ultimately hope. She became a monument of Mexican culture, indeed of the Spanish-speaking world, a singer whose “rough voice of tenderness” – the words of the Spanish film-maker Pedro Almodovar – could tear the heart out of anyone who spoke her native tongue. But in a career that lasted for most of her 93 years, Chavela Vargas gradually made inroads into male chauvinist, homophobic and Catholic church prejudices.
It could not have been easy being a cigar-smoking, tequila-swigging, gun-toting lesbian who sang cowboy songs in macho Mexico through much of the 20th century. Chavela Vargas: Singer adored in the Hispanic world
0 kommentar(er)
