sign in sign up
<<
Home , Don Quichotte, Emiliano Piedra, Lost in La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes, Richard Kiley, Sancho Panza

Media Representations of by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón

Sonya S. Gupta lamia Millia Islamia

Don Quixote de la Mancha is a foundational text of Western literature and can undoubtedly be considered the master narrative of Spanish culture. During the four hundred years of its publication, the has not only lent itself to varying critical perspectives, but has also, as Anthony Cascardi puts it "spawned a range of suceessors:.I Cinema is one medium through whieh the text has reaehed mass audienees eutting across cultures and languages. In faet, ever sinee the birth of cinema, the Knight of the Mournful Countenanee has inspired filrnrnakers around the world. Their visions of ' novel and his delusional devotee of ehivalry and romance have brought to the sereen innumerable representations of Don Quixote and whieh, together with Gustav Doré's rnid _19th century engravings, and later, Picasso' s drawings and the Lladró company' s international line of Quixote figurines, have created a "cumulative

I Anthony Cascardi, Cambridge Campanian ta Cervantes, Cambridge, Cambridge Universíty Press, 2002, p.I Sonya S. Gupta iconography,,2 that has shaped the protagonists of the seventeenth century Spanish classic in the popular imagination.3

2 See Augusto Manuel Torres, Conversaciones con Manuel Gutierrez Aragón, 2d ed., , Fundamentos, 1992, p 218-19. 3 As early as 1902, the French pair of Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Noguer became the first in bringing Cervantes' text to cinema in a 16 seconds film. Their compatriot George Meliés did it again in his film entitled Les aventures de (1908/Star Film, 355 feet. BW. Silent). The Catalan Narcis Cuyás was the first Spanish director to take up the challenge in 1910. Edward Dillon directed in 1914 the first North American version of Don Quixote and Amleto Palermi, an year later, the first Italian version called Il sogno Don Chisciotte. After these early adaptations in silent cinema, the Quixote was brought to the screen in the first sound track version in 1933 by the German Georg Wilhelm Pabst . In 1947 Rafael Rivelles and Rafael Gil gave cinema the first Quixote who spoke the language of its author. The 1957 Russian film, directed by Grigori Kosintsev with Cherkassov as Don Quixote, is said to be a masterpiece. More recently, the ballet versions of Barishnikov and Nureyev have been made into films. Hollywood has presented Quixote in several versions ranging from musicals to melodrama. The 1965 Broadway musical with as Quixote ( was cast as the original lead) became a huge success and was made into a film version in 1972 with Peter O'Toole as Quixote and Sophia Loren cast as Dulcinea. Hollywood's continued interest in Cervantes' masterpiece also produced the TNT tele-film, Don Quixote (2000) with as Quixote, Bob Hoskins as Sancho Panza and Vanessa Williams as Dulcinea. But the most ambitious project as far as Hollywood is concerned was 's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2000), a film that had to be abandoned just a few days into the shoot. On day one of the shoot, in northern , 70-year-old , who had landed the part of Don Quixote, began feeling ill. On the second day, while the film's main star prepared to shoot his initial scenes, the heavens opened and a flash flood washed away the entire set. On day four, while the crew tried to rebuild the set and scrape layers of mud from costumes and props, GiHiam realised that the entire landscape had changed colour. The f:32 million film project thus feH apart after illness, financial problems and floods. (Documentary ,1 hr.

378 Media Representations 01 Don Quixote by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón

This paper will look at recent attempts by the Spanish filmmaker Manuel Gutíérrez Aragón's at cinematic adaptations of the novel and the polítical and cultural contexts of their production. More specifically it will focus on bis recent film El caballero Don Quijote released in November 2002. Gutíérrez Aragón had earHer done a TV adaptatíon of Cervantes' masterpiece for Spanish national , the RTVE, which was broadcast in 1992. Gutiérrez Aragon's Cervantine inspiration, however, can be traced back to sorne of his earlier films. His 1984 film La noche más hennosa (The Most Beautiful Night) is inspired, for example, as far as the plot is concemed, by the short novel El curioso impertinente (The Curious Impertinent) intercalated in the Part I of Don Quixote (Book IV, Chapter VI too VIII).

I shall try to trace Gutiérrez Aragón's recent film and the TV adaptation of Don Quixote as moments in the last two decades or so of Spain's contemporary cultural history in which Cervantes has been invoked as a cultural icon for the articulation of Spanish national identity in democratic Spain. 1 propose that while the 1984 film La noche más hennosa was a daring adaptation of Cervantes's work, representative of the hybridity of the Spain of the 80s, the 1992 TV adaptation was a reverential retelling packaged by the officialist cultural project of the Spanish Socialist govemment. The recent film, El caballero Don Quijote, attempts to move away from that officialist stamp as well as the "cumulative iconography" around the protagonists of the novel that we have tried to trace earlier.

32 min, January 31st, 2003 LAlNY) records the "unmaking of the film". (Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe).

379 Gutiérrez Aragón and bis Cervantine Inspiration Without elaborating in this essay on the huge corpus of writing by modernists such as of Américo Castro or or Ortega y Gasset, it would suffice to say that there exists an entire twentieth century discourse in Spain, in its literature and historiography, on what constitutes "Spanishness" in which Cervantes has been invoked in a major way in the articulation of Spanish national identity. This iterative invocation of Cervantes and bis texts, particularly the Quixote, has continued even in present day Spain at the level of official as well as popular culture in reimagining a national identity at a time when multi-nation federalísm has tended to erode the old model of nation-state in the polítical climate obtaining in Post-Franco Spain. As Dona Kercher points out in her essay "The Marketing of Cervantine Magic for a New Global Image of Spain," 4 on March 21, 1991, the Spanish Cortes institutionalized this articulation by passing a law establishing the , an international network of Spanish cultural centers whose chief patron and honorary president is the king himself. Jt is therefore not surprising, she says, that in the most symbolic year of 1992, when the U.s. and major European film industries were celebrating the quincentenary of the so called "discovery of America" by releasing new films on the life and deeds of the explorers, the Spanish Ministry of Culture had acquired the rights to unfinished movie Don Quixote and was releasíng a montage of it done by Jess Franco, and Spanish TV was broadcasting Gutiérrez Aragón's adaptation of the first part of Don Quixote. The montage of Orson Welles's footage

4 See Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation, Ed. By Marsha Kinder, Durham, London, Duke University Press, 1997, pp 99-132.

380 was projected as a part of a commemorative project for the Expo '92 entítled "Don Quijote y Don Juan: la seducción de la utopía" (Don Quixote and Don Juan: The Seduction of Utopía). In connection with thís event, the Asociación de Directores de España (Association of Spanish. Stage Directors) published a cornmemorative volume on Welles's film, Don Quixote, which included a Spanish translation of sequences from Welles's script and artícles by film critics Juan Cobos and Esteve Riambau.5 We have said aboye that Gutiérrez Aragón's engagement with Cervantes dates earlier to the RTVE project that he was comrnissioned to directo However, Cervantes may, in fact, be the key towards understanding his cinematic credo. Vicente Molina Foix, in a recent book on Gutiérrez Aragón,6 has said that though he is considered a surrealist, Gutiérrez Aragón's cinematic fantasies are actualIy allegories of the real Spain. A graduate of the EOC (Escuela Oficial de Cine), Gutiérrez Aragón's filmography now spans more than three decades. He began his film career in the 70s. His films of the late seventies are rooted in specific moments

5 Welles's film is now available in a DVD edition brought out by Vellavision in 2003. Most with more than a passing interest in Welles know all about the piecemeal filrning of Don Quixote, a film that Welles eventually appeared to treat more as a personal project for his own enjoyment, rather than any kind of commercial enterprise. Quixote was not a studio product, and Welles was under no obligations to deliver it to anyone at any time. Welles's is a "modero" Quixote. The film transposes the action to a city full of cars and motorcycles, drugstores and junkyards, radio, and movie carneras. Even though the "finished product" offered by Jess Franco may be nowhere near a Welles original, scenes such as the one in which Quixote tries to rescue a woman he perceives to be captured by a dragon (and is actually just riding a Vespa) do give a glimpse of the hybrid nature of Welles's emerprise. 6 Vicente Molina Foíx, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Madrid, Cátedra, 2003

381 of polítical protest during the Franco era: Camada negra (Black brood, 1977), Sonámbulos (Sleepwalkers, 1978), El corazón del bosque (The Heart of the Forest, 1978), though ínspired by actions of polítical protest, have been considered surrealist. Thus, Molina Foix is of the view that there are "two " in the cinema of Gutiérrez Aragón. The first Spain, he says, is verifiable, terrestrial, and geographically plausible. And the second one his in the oneiric terrain of his invention, created by the fantastic and magical gaze of a filmmaker. Molina Foix, has therefore cornmented that though Gutiérrez Aragón is considered cosmopolitan, or even psychoanalytical in his approach to cinema, steeped as he is in the modero novel and theatre rather than on a purely Spanish diet, his entire oeuvre, not just his TV and cinematic adaptations of the Quixote, can be understood in the light of bis Cervantine inspiratíon7 which Gutiérrez Aragón has himself acknowledged on more than one occasion.

What 1 like most about Don Quixote de la Mancha is that Don Quixote traverses the Mancha, the geographical place known to a11, arrives in towns with specific names, but, this Mancha, the concrete place where these are located, the place in which one can almost sme11 the roped mules, and in which we can recognize a11 the characters that mili around in the novel, is nevertheless a place where magical episodes take place. On the one hand it is a very real place and on the other very magical. 8

7 Op.cit, P 22 . 8 "Lo que más me gusta de Don Quijote de la Mancha es que Don Quijote discurre por la Mancha, lugar geográfico conocido de todos, llega a pueblos con nombres concretos, pero, sin embargo esa Mancha, lugar concreto donde los haya, en que casi se pueden oler las reatas de

382 Manuel

And later, on the filming of El caballero don Quijote, Gutiérrez Aragón makes it clear that his engagement with Cervantes, specially the Quixote, is not limited to his adaptations of the Quixote but has actualIy to do with the way he understands the very nature of representation in cinema:

From the very beginning, when my classmates used to consider it a pain, the Quixote seemed to me a magical book - and 1 use this term deliberately given that it is usually applied to my films And it is from Cervantes that 1 learned to take realism to its farthest límits. This is very much there in my films probably more in others than in El caballero don Quijote, in which Cervantism has tormented me more than it has helped.9

Quixotic motifs are present in Gutiérrez Aragón' s films prior to the RTVE project of 1992. In Maravillas (1980), for example, besides the final scene which is a shot of the protagonist Maravillas and her father on the rooftop terrace of their building with the statue of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Madrid' s Pl~za de España in the background between the two of them, there

mulas, y en el que podemos reconocer a todos los personajes que pululan la obra, es un lugar donde suceden episodios mágicos. Por una parte es un lugar muy real y por otra muy mágico." See Torres, op.cit, p 135. 9 "El Quijote me pareció un libro mágico - utilizo con pinzas este término, pese a que se suele aplicar a mis películas -- desde el principio, cuando mis compañeros de estudios lo consideraban un peñazo. Y de Cervantes aprendí a llevar el realismo hasta sus fronteras más lejanas. Eso sí está en mis películas, por lo menos en algunas, quizás incluso más que en ésta de El caballero don Quijote, en que el cervantismo me atormenta más que me ayuda." See Blanco y Negro Cultural, 9 November, 2002, cited in Molina Foix, op cit., p 226.

383 are several sequences which are clearly based on Quixotic motifs. 1O The Quixote is more overtly present in his La noche más hermosa (The Most Beautiful Night, 1984). "The Most Beautiful Night" is a film about the making of a telefilm ostensibly based on Moliere's Don Juan. The tide credits cite Moliere, José Zorrilla and Lorenzo da Ponte, the Italian who wrote three for Mozart, (Fígaro' s Weddings, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte) as text supports for the screenplay. The feature film, however, is based on the plot motifs of The Curious Impertinent, the short novel intercalated in the Part 1 of the Quixote. The telefilm's producer Federico (José Sacristán), is having an affair with Bibí (Bibí Andersen) cast as Doña Inés. He believes his young wife Elena (Victoria Abril) is unfaithful to him. To test Elena's fidelity, he actually bribes his best friend Osear (Osear Ladoire), also the telefim's first time director, to flirt with her at a dinner party at their house. Thus, Federico enacts the role of Cervantes' s Anselmo, the "impertinent" husband who, in attempt to test her virtue, facilitates his wife's adultery with his best friend .

El Quijote ... of Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón

While Maravillas and La noche más hermosa mine the ambiguities, ruptures and displacements of the Cervantine text, the 1991 TV adaptation, El Quijote de Miguel de Cervantes, approximates the traditional idealist readings of Don Quixote and favors the humanist notions of authorial control and textual unity. It needs to be pointed out, however, that unlike the two earlier films mentioned, the TV series was overtly presented as a literary

10 For a detailed study of Quixotic motifs in Maravillas, see, Dona Kercher, "The Marketing of Cervantine Magic for a New Global Image of Spain" in Marsha Kinder, op. cit., p 105-114.

384 Media Representations of Don Quixote by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón adaptatíon of Don Quixote. In fact, the TV adaptation was hailed by critics as being "faithful" to the original. Crities have found it difficult to reconcile tbis "conservative auteurist position" with Gutiérrez Aragon's earlier directorial trajectory trajectory the fault was not entirely with GA: working as a cornmissioned director is not always easy. This was RTVE's grandiose project. Its producer Emiliano Piedra had been given the financial go ahead in 1988 in the final months of Pilar Miró's term as directora general of the RTVE and the arnbítious project was c10sely associated with the now highly debated Miró policy of State subsidies. AH the bíg names had been mobílized as this was conceíved as a quality program that symbolized the cultural aspirations of the . But even so, GA had to put bis foot down when it carne to the screenplay. Pompously entrusted to Camilo José Cela for an astronomical fee. the screenplays were, in the words of Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón of no use at all. "They were not screenplays, they were nothing, just objects."11 From day one it was said that these "useless objects" were not even of the Nobel - prize winning author of The Farnily of Pascual Duarte but were, in fact, like other titles, merely signed by him, a work of shadow writers, who in this case - if they exísted - at least appeared in the credits along with Cela. Gutiérrez Aragón' s insistence, TVE and Piedra decided sensibly to give full freedom to the director of the series who hímself had a long trajectory as a scriptwriter.12 The cast of the TV Series was equalIy prestígious. played the part of Quixote and , that of Sancho Panza. Fernando Rey was an internationally celehrated

11 Augusto M. Torres, op.cit, p 216. 12 See Molina Foix, op.cit., pp115-124.

385 actor known for rus work in Luis Buñuel films and this was his fourth appearance in a media representation of Don Quixote. The TV series was a resounding success with audiences as well as critics and received severa! awards including one at the Cannes television festival. The episodes were later turned into a feature length movie that was widely shown in Spain as well as in Film festivals in and Los Angeles among other places. The TVE put out a two-cassette video pack which was bought by those who knew Cervantes's work as well as those who were aspiring for mere TV literacy. The TVE production, which certainly stoOO out for its high production values, however, was lirnited to the first part one of the novel. An extension was planned, with Gutiérrez Arag6n as scriptwriter and as director. But in the meantime Pilar Mir6 had left hér post in TVE and later, Erniliano Piedra and Fernando Rey passed away, making it difficult that there would be a sequel. Ten years later, much the same distance that separated the two parts of the novel, (and with Terry Gilliam's postmodern The Man who killed Don Quixote figuring in as Avellanada's Quixote), Gutiérrez Aragon' s film adaptation of the second part of the Quijote was released in 2002 under the title El caballero Don Quijote. While the TV Series received high acclaim, the Itlm has received rnixed reactions. Praise and criticism, however, have both been driven by the nostalgia of the previous production. plays Don Quixote while Sancho is interpreted by Carlos Iglesias. While the Itlm has had the obvious disadvantage of having to fit the entire second part of the Quixote into 119 minutes, it has the advantages which the second part offers in terms of it being far

386 ______M_edia Representatfans 01 Don Quixote by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón more ambitious and with greater self-reflexivity and psychological depth as it traces the progressive disenchantment of Don Quixote with his fantastic project. Commenting on the relationship between literature and cinema, in the context of this production, Gutiérrez Aragón has said:

At times an adaptation is more a war than an embrace ... The difficulties of adapting a novel to cinema He precisely in the fact that their worlds are too close, and their narrative devices are much the same ... In practice the greatest problem i8 in knowing what you retain and what you remove from a novel. Not that their worlds are opposed or contradictory to each other. They are bordering genres, neighbours, who are at times are friends and at others enemies.13 Gutiérrez Aragón has, therefore, said about El caballero ... that it is a realist film that respects the original text to the extent a film can respect it and that it is not a film inspired by the characters, but rather by the complexity of the book. 14 Implicit in this statement is a position that goes beyond humanist notions of authorial control, textual unity and literary origins. By declaring

13 "A veces una adaptación es más una guerra que un abrazo... Las dificultades de adaptación de una novela al cine residen precisamente en que sus mundos están demasiados próximos, en que sus resortes narrativos son los mismos ... En la práctica el mayor problema consiste en saber qué dejas y qué quitas de una novela. No el que sus mundos sean contrarios o contradictorios. Son géneros fronterizos, vecinos, a veces amigos, a veces enemigos." Cited in Molina Foix, op.cit, p. 226 14 "Se trata, pues, de una película de base realista, que respeta el texto original hasta donde lo puede respetar una película y. por supuesto, recoge el espíritu del libro cervantino. No es una película inspirada en los personajes, sino en la complejidad del libro". Cited in "Entre lo real y lo soñado: El caballero Don Quijote" in http://archivodigital.cervantes.es

387 that what he is faithful to is not an "original text" but the complexity contained in it, Gutiérrez Aragón moves from an idealist to a postmodernist positioning. The Tosilos scene, perhaps, best represents this border crossing. Tosilos or Dulcinea: Border Crossings in El caballero ... In an artiele entitled "El cine como el tiempo" ("Cinema as Time"), Gutiérrez Aragón has said that " ... the syntax of cinema is akin to that of dreams ... characters move from one place to another instantly, short situations turn long, an year into a minute ... this is how the passage of time is in dreams." 15 That rnight partially explain the Tosilos scene. A very secondary character in the novel, the ambiguous page Tosilos has an impacting intervention in the film. A decidedly postmodern rip-off on the Cervantine text is the casting of Juan Diego Botto as the page who appears disguised as Dulcinea. Tosilos appears, among others, in Chapter LVI of (Part 2) - "Of the extraordinary and unaccountable combat between Don Quixote de La Mancha, and the Lacquey Tosilos, in vindication of the matron Donna Rodriguez's daughter." The page is entrusted with the job of vanquishing Don Quixote in a dual without killing or wounding him. He, however, falls in love with the beautiful daughter of Donna Rodriguez and prefers to give up the fight so that he can marry to her. The Tosilos scene in the film refers to an

15 " .• .la sintaxis del cine es como la de los sueños. Y no sólo en mis películas, que son un poco sonambúlicas, sino la de cualquier película. Los personajes se trasladan de lugar de manera inmediata, situaciones cortas significan situaciones largas, un año en un minuto ... así transcurre el tiempo en el interior de los sueños." Manuel Gutiérrez Arag6n in Triunfo, March, 1982. Cited in Molina Foix, p 207.

388 Media Representations 01 Don Quixote by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón earlier episode (Part 2, Chapter XXXV) when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are the guests of the Duke and the Duchess, and Merlin appears with Lady Dulcinea proposing that if Sancho would take three thousand lashes, that would disenchant lady Dulcinea who thus would be able to retain her original beautiful self that they were witnessing then. At the beginning of the next chapter, it is disclosed that the entire episode had been concocted by the Duke's steward, who acted as Merlin himself, and instructed a page to impersonate Dulcinea.

Tosilos in disguise as Dulcinea is acted by Botto. Cornmenting on the idea of a transvestite Dulcinea, Guitiérrez Aragón has said:

People think it is a caprice of mine that Dulcinea be played by aman, but no, this in fact was a joke of the dukes and that is how it is in the book. Transvestism is not a thing of our times. In those days there were a lot of men who dressed themselves up as women and many women who dressed as men, among other reasons because that was the only way these women had to come out of their homes and live adventures ... there was a lot of sexual transvestism in the times of the Quixote.16

16 "«La gente cree que es un capricho mío que Dulcinea 10 haga un hombre, pero no, eso es una broma de los duques y en el libro está así. El travestismo no es cosa de esta época. En aquella época había muchos hombres que se vestían de mujeres y muchas mujeres que se vestían de hombres ... Había mucho trasvase sexual en la época de don Quijote." Declaraciones de Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón recogidas por plus.es el 27/11/02, http://juandiegobotto.iespana.es/quijote.htm

389 Gutiérrez Aragón has described the text of chapter XXXV as moving between the sublime and the parody.17 Juan Diego Botto delivers the difficult monologue with a profound melancholy. 1t is a long fixed camera shot of as long as a minute and a half. The blue studio lights add to this duIcineated make believe world. Barbara Fuchs, in a recent study on the trope of disguise in Cervantes? works, has presented the thesis that by using a series of instances of trans-behaviour, cross-dressing and transvestism, "his texts constantly de-emphasize and problematize essence" interrogating hegemonic categories of identity. The suspension of what the reader expects as the character' s "true" identity frustrates and challenges "an exclusionist version of Spain.,,18 Don Quixote, thus, in such a reading, himself becomes a fundamental instance of transvestism: an old country gentleman in disguise as a prototype of heroism and valour. In his aboye cited 1984 film, La noche más hermosa, Gutiérrez Aragón had cast Bibí Anderson, a transsexual actress as Doña Inés. Bibí had made it big in Spanish cinema in the heydays of the Movida, the youth movement of the 80s that swamped Madrid after Franco's death. As we had said, La noche más hermosa is a film about the making of a TV movie based on Moliere's Don Juan. In the feature film. top TV executives insist

17 "Entre lo real y lo soñado: El caballero Don Quijote" in http://archivodigital.cervantes.es 18 Barbara Fuchs. Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity, Champaign. University of Press, 2003, p 9, 5. Transvestism figures in several films of the post-Franco years. Ventura Pons's film Ocaña, retrato intermitente (1978) documented the transvestite community of of the transition years. Pedro Almodóvar too subverts traditional gender roles by introducing transsexuals, for ego In Todo sobre mi madre ( 2000) or in La ley del deseo (1987) where Carmen Maura plays the role of a transsexual.

390 Media Representations o/ Don Quixote by Manuel Gutíérrez Aragón on casting Bibí Andersen to cash in on her popular screen presence and she is cast as Doña Inés. But finally, through a series of intrigues, the producer's wife Elena is cast as Doña Inés and she defines who should play Don Juan opposite her- "the one who best simulates love ... someone who has to simulate as a profession". The answer is all too obvious. It has to be Bibí. Bibí's sexual ambiguity creates a visual of a disembodied gender. As Vicente Molina Foix has commented in his above mentioned book on Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, "Bibí is desired by aH, aware of her androgynous legend and Elena wishes (and procures) to be the Inés of Don Juan Tenorio played by Bibí." (p.96). The film ends when Bibí triumphantIy plots with the dissident union members forcing the dosure of the studios. In the Tosilos sequence of El caballero... Gutiérrez Aragón takes Chapter LVI to a similar terrain of ambiguity. In the said chapter, Don Quixote explains Tosilos' unwillingness to fight as the effect of enchantment and the dukes decide to confine tbe page for a week or two, under tbe pretence of seeing if he will return to his former shape. The Tosilos sequence in the film, however, shows Don Quixote seeing tbe transformation of Dulcinea into Tosilos as he takes off bis dotbes and his wig. In contrast to the previous scene when he appears as Dulcinea, the blue studio lights of tbe fake night sky are replaced by ordinary lighting of a real world. Thus in both films, the objects of male desire - Lady Dulcinea and Doña Inés are not represented as biological women. In her study of Persiles y Sigismunda, the novel tbat Cervantes was writing parallel to the Part II of the Quixote, Diana de Armas Wilson has shown how Cervantes exploits the figure of the

391 androgyne, the trope of sexual parity, in order to displace hierarchy through a non dominant sexual difference. 19 Gutiérrez Aragón's undulcineated world is closer to new readings of the Quixote, mainly undertaken by women Cervantistas such as the late Ruth El Saffar who in her critical works has questioned the tacit belief that the masculine always represents the norm for Cervantes. By doing so, Gutiérrez Aragón's films reimagine and represent a sexuality and a concept of identity more in consonance with the new pluralistic ambitions of contemporary Spain.

19 See Diana de Annas Wilson, Allegories 01 Love: Cervantes' "Persiles and Sigísmunda", Princeton University Press, 1991.

392