The Red Virgin

La virgen roja

VERDICT: An imaginative and engrossing essay on feminism and motherhood, Paula Ortiz’s ‘The Red Virgin’ features an unforgettable Najwa Nimri as a stage mother out of hell, who sees her brilliant 16-year-old daughter as a sculpture she has created to change the world in 1930’s Spain.

Female sexuality seen from a woman’s P.O.V. has been a hot ticket at festivals recently – consider that San Sebastian opened with an underwhelming remake of Emmanuelle vaunting a feminist approach to pleasure in the bedroom. Apart from its vaguely lurid title, director Paula Ortiz’s The Red Virgin (La virgen roja) is a universe away in its astonishing account of two extraordinary real women: the child prodigy Hildegart Rodriguez Carballeira, whose teenage treatises on sexuality attracted the attention of sexologist and social reformer Havelock Ellis, and her brilliant but perverse mother Aurora, who deliberately conceived her as a scientific experiment in eugenics which was intended to mold the girl into “the perfect woman”.

Shot tongue-in-cheek as a duet between the two leading ladies, and peppered with witty dialogue, music and camerawork, the film feels like a point of arrival for Ortiz, who has built on her early Spanish kudos for Chrysalis and The Bride in the international production Across the River and Into the Trees, based on Hemingway’s last unfinished novel. The Red Virgin is a craftily sculpted work of art in itself and, even if the humor remains low-key, it’s a blast to watch the insanity unfold. After its bow on the San Sebastian stage, this Spanish-American Amazon coprod should have no trouble finding audiences at festivals and even beyond.

There are shades of Bella Baxter and Poor Things here as we watch a parent outrageously abuse a young human life in an experiment that is inevitably going to backfire, in this case tragically. As the control freak parent who believes – really believes – she owns her daughter, actress and singer Najwa Nimri is a bolt of icy electricity, and her quietly memorable performance as the browbeating mom out of hell should become a meme in the genre. The early part of the film is narrated in Aurora’s calm, reasonable voice as she describes her contempt for men and her decision to have a child that was “all hers”. The best way to do this, she reasoned, was to become impregnated by the parish priest, because he was the only man who would never lay claim to any offspring. Amazingly, this is in Galicia in 1914.

Under Aurora’s severely regimented educational program, baby Hildegart is reading by age 2, writing by age 3 and speaking six languages by age 8. She is also incredibly docile and trusting of her mother-master. One day Aurora pulls out a huge pair of scissors and snips off her braids. Enter an attractive 16-year-old (winningly played by the fresh but already commanding Alba Planas) with thick bobbed hair and a monster intellect that outstrips even her mother’s. She still follows mom’s hourly timetable that includes long hours of reading philosophy and politics aimed at women’s rights and social reform, alternated with physical exercise and stretches of writing essays on a big manual typewriter — even at the dinner table while she eats.

One of her first pieces of serious writing, on female love and sexuality, is published by left-wing progressive Eduard de Guzman (a twinkling-eyed Pepe Viyuela). At first he suspects Aurora of having written the passionate, learned philippic on women’s bodies (what could a girl know about sex?), but when Hildegart opens her mouth it becomes clear she has all the answers. The time is 1931 and the monarchy has just fallen, clearing the way for the founding of the Second Spanish Republic. In a triumphant mood, an enormous crowd of common people take to the streets while Hildegart and Aurora nervously plow their way through them. It is here that a significant difference in their thinking arises: Aurora is a progressive who prefers to theorize about freedom but who hates the chaos of socialist politics, where everybody has a voice. Hildegart, on the other hand, means to pass from theory to practice.

Opportunity appears when a charming young writer, Abel Vilella (Patrick Criado), invites her to attend a meeting of the Socialist party. Naturally Aurora is always at her side telling her what to say and do. But when Hildegart takes the stage in front of a sea of men and launches into a scathing address over the absence of other women in the room, she is electrifying. Aurora is concerned.

Still worse, for her mother, is the obvious attraction between Hildegart and Abel. Helping the girl sneak around mama – who firmly informs her that love is a waste of intellectual time – is the household domestic Macarena (Aixa Villagran), one of the most penetratingly human portrayals of a servant in a long time. Macarena, who is not literate enough to read the tawdry romance novels she loves, lights up a forbidden cigarette in the kitchen and listens while Hildegart reads to her. It becomes clear that although the girl has been brainwashed over the years, there is still a flash of rebellion in her that Macarena encourages, even though she herself is a battered wife who suffers her own wrongs in silence.

The tragic ending to the story has not only been foreshadowed, it is calmly confessed by the murderer in the first scene. It still comes as a sickening shock when Ortiz slowly and methodically lets her actors play it out. Remaining true to her ideas till the end, Aurora shows not the least repentance at her trial, declaring, “The sculptor, after discovering the most minimal imperfection in his work, destroys it.”

The moving final scene reproduces photographs from 1933 of Hildegart’s funeral cortege, followed by a large crowd of mourners who knew and admired the girl who championed women’s equality in 16 books and 150 newspaper articles written in the last three years of her life.

Director: Paula Ortiz
Screenplay: Eduard Sola, Clara Roquet
Producers: Maria Zamora, Stefan Schmitz

Cast: Najwa Nimri, Alba Planas, Aixa Villagrán, Patrick Criado, Pepe Viyuela
Cinematography:  Pedro J. Marquez

Editing: Pablo Gomez-Pan
Production design: Javier Alvarino
Costume design: Arantxa Ezquerro
Music: Juanma Latorre, Guille Galvan
Sound: Coque Fernandez Lahera, Alex F. Capilla, Nacho Royo-Villanova
Production companies: Elastica Films (Spain), Avalon Productora Cinematografica (Spain), Amazon Alternative LLC (USA)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Official Selection)
In Spanish, English, French
114 minutes