Bellas De Noche or the Myth of a Vedette’s Talent
Bellas de Noche is a documentary by María José Cuevas produced by Netflix in 2016 and homonymous with the 1975 sex comedy directed by Miguel M. Delgado, starring Sasha Montenegro and Carmen Salinas which inaugurated the Mexican ficheras/cabaret film genre, prohibited ever before. Bellas de Noche starts with archival images of Lin May in Tivoli (Isaac, 1974) and television surveys defining what a vedette is; the film delves into the memories of the 80s vedettes Rossy Mendoza, Olga Breeskin, Lyn May, Wanda Seux, and Princesa Yamal. Bellas de Noche accompanies them for a few days to develop their current projects and convinces them to show some last dances and last sings in the frame.
In Bellas de Noche or Talent as Sex Exploitation, Olga Breeskin, in accelerated video stock, prepares to go on stage being approached by people and more people when at the same time, she gives an interview to TV presenter César Costa. Olga of the present, still surrounded by a production team, makes the staff sing (“We all want to see Olga”) to tell them that she wanted to learn about everything, like playing the violin and doing a job like any other, but she soon felt the insistence on her looks (“Why doesn’t she dance and leave the violin?”), so she decided to create a character for herself. Rossy Mendoza reflects on the beauty in which Albert Einstein said (she is misquoting) we should all live and then exclaims, “Kikiri Meow!”. Rossy breaks the Betty Boop piñata in her building’s courtyard and tells how in nuns’ school, the nuns taught them to shower with clothes on and then liked to take them off. Rossy feigns embarrassment about looking naked on YouTube with Zayas (“How rude!”) and agrees to be crowned as the tlacoyo queen. Wanda Seux puts on a feathered headdress that reaches the floor and flirts with the camera “I am 62 years old”, already a doggy lady, far from the one who sang on Argentine TV “Loca, crazy girl, loca, loca, loca, dicen que yo soy… They say I am. Ah, ah!”; not even being able to put the phone back on the wall and fighting for the cause in the streets (“animal abuse/ to the penal code” ). Wanda takes her Iron and vitamins from the oncologist on her way to share experiences with her countrywoman Yamal and promising that the ones she sheds will be the last tears.
Princess Yamal looks at herself in the mirror and remembers her first desire to be an artist. Moreover, why be an artist, Yamal’s cousin asked her? “Because I have some belles gambes.” Yamal kneads with energy and becomes one more of the “Ladrones viejos, leyendas del artegio” (González, 2007) when she remembers the theft of jewelry from the Museum of Anthropology, a crime in which she unknowingly accompanied her romantic partner and which landed her in jail for two years. Princess Yamal boasts contentedly to a daughter who wishes to freeze her like Walt Disney’s body when she dies (which we could say would make her a Disney princess), and Princess Yamal, triumphant, raises her arms in the air, as in the Titanic and thanks us for remembering her. Lin May strolls through the Condesa parks, maintaining her ability to make everything she touches surreal. She reveals her sexual fetiche of having sex in the treetops, but also eccentricities on the verge of madness, such as bringing her husband’s corpse to sleep with him (“until my mom took him away from me”), to then return to the daily facet, with the same null gestural expression, in which she declares to have been married seven times and to have sex three times a day.
Cuevas unmasks the myth of the vedette’s talent by entering the six legendary demi goddesses’ intimacy, with skill between profit and respect. Cuevas accompanies the march for animal rights and manages the interview between Yamal and Wanda Seux, provoking the cinema-verité type action, in which we see them in their mutual support and character breaks. Cuevas waits patiently for the women because she knows that after the necessary time, behind the facade of success and strength, there is the ugly face of old age and the sad refusal to accept it. The denial of displacement and aging (“What is wrong with wrinkles, Do I not give everything on the stage?)
The myth of the vedette’s talent shows us a bizarre tribute to the cinema of the ’90s: the top shot with rose petals on Rossy Mendoza as an American Beauty (Mendes, 1999), or reveals the artifice that turned and wrapped them into shiny objects of desire (“Seeing you imposing, you never bent down”); before discovering themselves as shooting stars who lack something when they lack the showcase and the fantasy. Shooting stars are two eyes that have been able to dominate millions of eyes (“You must be strong and bewitch people”) because ultimately, the invented personality is, or feels, natural (“I am an Arabian princess…we are goddesses”). Behind the myth of the vedette’s talent is sexual exploitation disguised in splendid gifts (“I had a trunk of centenarians, where is it? Who knows”), love, boyfriends, husbands, and corruption through drugs and alcohol. Sexual exploitation that Cuevas’ documentary mentions tangentially and not directly, as did Cuando conocí al Chapo (Armella, 2017) with Televisa’s catalog of actresses for sex exploitation during the 1990s.
Moreover, Cuevas presents us with the Bellas at night, ready to have one last dance and one last song, with the spotlight on in their living rooms and the empty nightclub (“The stars shine when the sun goes down”). They face the misfortune of cancer, feeling wrong about the exploitation they suffered (“You can fool all of them, not me anymore/ you are a real actor and you direct the comedy/ there is no more show”). They ended up being single or — like Lin May — married to a little old man walking away through the slow, Buñuelian depth of field, not toward madness, but toward the uneasiness of Él (Buñuel, 1953), taking advantage of the last signs of interest from the press and Netflix to promote Olga’s spa “Todos queremos masajito” (“We All Want Massage”). Bellas, the beauties, embracing Christianity in the Shalom7 license plate van, or in the photo embracing the dead puppy or, even, embracing the recently concluded Rossy’s manuscript Universes in evolution, searching for a charitable editor to publish it.
