Aventurera (Adventuress) is a superheated melodrama from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema -- the film was made by Albert Gout in 1950 and features the Havana-born Ninon Servilla, the erotic icon of the so-called Rumbera films -- stylized crime pictures in the mode of American film noir featuring elaborate Afro-Cuban dance sequences. The plot is a feverish contrivance designed to fling bigger-than-life characters into one another with maximum violence -- the film is like some kind of atom-smasher, ramping up the force of the particles in motion until they explode all over the screen. The camera-work and direction are pedestrian but efficiently utilitarian -- what counts in Aventurera is the force of personalities in conflict and the delirious narrative. The film is Shakespearian in its complicated plot -- it's not particularly poetic or profound in any way, but the narrative is like the source material for one of Shakespeare's plays, a frenzied melange of impersonations and transposed identities.
The narrative in Aventurera can't be described without revealing surprises in the plot. So the reader is duly advised that SPOILERS follow. Elena is a upper class girl living with her parents in Chihuaha. (The film briskly establishes location by a title and a shot of the city's cathedral.) A suave zoot-suiter named Lucio is sniffing around, apparently in hopes of seducing the ingenue. In the first of the film's many reversals of fortune, Elena comes home to find her very proper and matronly mother in the arms of another man. Her mother absconds with her lover and Elena's father promptly commits suicide. Elena moves to Juarez where she is sexually harassed by a series of employers, quits those jobs and ends up on the street. The smarmy Lucio appears and offers her dinner at a night club. (The girl has been starving.) Lucio gets the girl drunk and sells her to the Madame who runs a high-class brothel in the suite of rooms above the night club floor. (The Madame has a little window with louvers that she can open to survey activities on the dance floor below.) The Madame, a imperious middle-aged woman who wears very decollete blouses with huge flouncy black skirts, drugs Elena and peddles her to an older man who rapes her. Elena is outraged and threatens the Madame, Rosaura. To deter her from future disobedience of this kind, Rosaura summons her enforcer, the gimpy Rengo, who draws a switchblade and threatens to slash her face. This terrifies Elena and she remains obedient to the evil Rosaura.
As it turns out, Elena is a fantastic dancer. We see her perform several times on the stage of Rosaura's night club. During these sequences, the stage expands into a vast set, larger than the entire interior of the night club, with elaborate colonnades and Moorish minarets. In the first production number, Elena wears a harem-girl outfit and performs an elaborately choreographed belly dance with an army of dancing girls and bare-chested slaves. In a second production number, "Zig-Zig-Zig", Elena does a spectacular Rumba wearing an enormous headdress made from two huge bejeweled pineapples. While she dances, the pineapples split open to reveal bundles of bananas and the fringe of her skirt above her bare hips is also made from bananas that wobble and shake as she performs. In this number, Elena actually sings the famous Chiquita banana song. Lucio who is still sniffing around meets with the heroine. Elena is recruited into a jewelry robbey in which Lucio shoots it out with the cops. Elena gets away when Lucio is apprehended and, later, sent to the "Prison Islands" for twenty years. Fed up with Rosaura's imperious demands, Elena tries to leave the brothel qua night club and is again threatened by Rengo -- in one scene, Rengo actually drags Elena up the steps into the whore house by her hair. Some other thugs intervene and Rengo is about to be killed by those gangsters when Elena intervenes inexplicably to save him. By this point, Elena is seeing a law student from a wealthy family in Guadalajara. She elopes with the law student to his home, a palatial mansion planning to marry him. Here is the film's second shocking plot development: it turns out that Elena's fiancee is the son of Rosaura. Rosaura has been leading a double-life -- she is a society matron in Guadalajara but also running the brothel and night club in Juarez. (She pretends that she spends half the year in the United States.) Rosaura is a widow and in order to support her two sons, Mario and Ricardo, she has been moonlighting as the madam of the Juarez brothel. Elena now sees that she can take revenge on Rosaura for turning her into a prostitute. She tells Rosaura that she will marry her son "and shame him every day. And, then, when (she) is bored with him, (she) will leave him all alone." Indeed, at the betrothal party, Elena dances the rumba, wiggling her ass in such a way that all members of the Guadalajara polite society flee the house in horror. Elena, then, proposes that she will honeymoon with Mario in Juarez. This terrifies Rosaura who pleads with her to leave. (Just for giggles, Elena is also trying to seduce Mario's brother, Ricardo, to heap further shame on the family.) Meanwhile, Elena has demanded that her lawyer-husband, Mario, take action to free Lucio, her former lover and the gangster who shot it out with the cops, from prison. This is apparently accomplished by wining and dining the Judge assigned the case -- the legal system is assumed to be wholly corrupt.
The action moves to Juarez. Elena dances in Rosaura's club under her married name -- part of her campaign to humiliate her mother-in-law. Various thugs are sent to kill Rosaura, but she evades their efforts with the help of Rengo, the gimpy brothel-enforcer who has now become her loyal bodyguard. (Rengo who is hideous-looking little fellow has fallen in love with Elena and worships her.) Elena's mother is dying and the daughter goes to her bedside, but only to refuse to forgive her for her adultery. Lucio ultimately comes to blackmail Elena -- it's completely impenetrable as to why she had Mario get him released from prison. (Presumably, this is part of her revenge scheme). Elena tries to dissuade Lucio from his blackmail scheme. She now realizes that she is really in love with Mario who has proved his mettle by continuing to love her notwithstanding the vehement objections of Rosaura. By this time, Elena has revealed that Rosaura is running the night club and whore house. Choosing Elena over his domineering and cruel mother, with whom the film now seems to sympathize, Mario swears his love to Elena. Lucio fights with Mario. Just as he's about to kill Mario, Lucio is stabbed in the back by Rengo. Rengo a broken man, mourns as he watches Mario and Elena walking down the rainy neon-lit street in Juarez toward what is suggested, at least, to be a happy ending. I've left out several subplots and various characters whose motivation I didn't exactly understand, but the reader will get the gist of things.
The film is full of musical numbers that comment on the action. At the climax, Elena tries to bribe Lucio to leave her alone -- she strips off all of her jewelry and shoves it in Lucio's big paw: when a Mexican heroine starts divesting herself of her jewelry, the audience knows that she is sincere and desperate. While Elena tries to bribe the scoundrel, Lucio, a man and woman croon on stage the ballad of the "Adventuress" who must exchange herself for "diamonds to pay for her crimes." When Elena dances, she jumps around frantically like Josephine Baker and it seems that she could knock down walls with the thrusts of her hips. The movie is intricately plotted but the story doesn't really matter -- it's just a device for wringing the maximum of emotion from the feral revenge plot. The movie is memorable. It was wildly and disproportionately praised by the French including Truffaut, and the vulpine Ninon Sevilla was an icon of the French New Wave. Sevilla is one of those actresses who seems plain at first, even nondescript, but when she turns up the heat the screen melts with her presence.
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