Doña Bárbara Unleashed: From Venezuelan Plains to International Screen
2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.60.3.0613
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Gender, and Advertising
ResumoJenni M. Lehtinen’s Doña Bárbara Unleashed: From Venezuelan Plains to International Screen offers an in-depth analysis of four screen adaptations of Venezuelan author Rómulo Gallegos’s novel Doña Bárbara (1929). Considered a masterpiece of Venezuelan literature and a classic in Latin America’s literary canon, Gallegos’s novel explores the conflict between civilization and barbarism through the interactions it stages between Santos Luzardo, a lawyer from Venezuela’s Universidad Central, and Doña Bárbara, a “devourer of men” who controls the lands in the plains of Apure. Portrayed as a powerful, dangerous, and beautiful heroine/villainess unafraid to disrespect traditional gender roles, Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara has seduced readers in Venezuela and abroad, which has led her to live several afterlives in film and television. Each adaptation, as Lehtinen argues, confirms the character’s “chameleonic ability to change with the times, personifying the fantasies, fears and passions of different generations of television and film audiences” (5) and mirroring political, social, and cultural changes experienced by Latin American and Latinx communities across history.Lehtinen’s choice to analyze and establish a dialogue between the 1943 Mexican film adaptation directed by Fernando de Fuentes, Betty Kaplan’s 1998 film adaptation, and the telenovelas produced in 2008 and 2016 by Telemundo offers the readers the opportunity to see how those changes resonate with the changes in how Doña Bárbara, Santos Luzardo, and the rest of the characters are represented as well as in how Gallegos’s original plot is modified and expanded. Furthermore, Lehtinen’s selection invites us to reflect on how Latin American and Latinx audiences enter in productive dialogue in the context of media studies, and how new social media platforms like Facebook enable audiences to acquire a more active role in shaping the decisions regarding casting and plot development of telenovelas and other forms of media production. Doña Bárbara Unleashed thus constitutes not only an illuminating contribution to existing scholarship on adaptation theory and fandom studies, but also a timely contribution to the fields of media studies and Latin American and Latinx studies, currently marked by debates regarding transnational mobility, migration, and the revisiting and challenging of traditional gender roles in light of the powerful changes triggered by the “Green Wave” and the #NiUnaMenos Movement.In her introduction, “Doña Bárbara, Her Critics, Her Story and Her Fans,” Lehtinen underscores the sociopolitical agenda of progress and improvement Gallegos embedded in Doña Bárbara, the novel’s ambiguous ending, and its transnational appeal as discussed by cultural critics Doris Sommer (1991) and Roberto González Echevarría (1990) as three central elements that enabled Doña Bárbara to “reappear” over and over again on screen, each time mutating to reflect new social, political, and cultural climates and changes in the understandings of female power and femininity in Latin America. Lehtinen also develops her approach to adaptation theory, which she defines as “comparative pluralist” (7), for it does not view each adaptation as a separate artwork but rather creates a “dialogue between different adaptations of the same source text, whilst further taking into account the social, historical, cultural, and political context in which each adaptation was produced” (7). This dialogue is informed by her close reading of film reviews and biographical and autobiographical accounts in the case of the 1943 and 1998 films, and of fan reviews posted on Facebook pages in the case of the 2008 and 2016 telenovelas, a selection of materials that makes Doña Bárbara Unleashed a valuable contribution to the scholarship on non-Anglophone, transnational fandom studies.Each of the following four chapters is dedicated to one of the adaptations, though Lehtinen makes sure to always put two or more of the adaptations in dialogue with each other and with Gallegos’s novel, productively underscoring points of convergence and difference. Chapter 1 focuses on Fernando de Fuentes’s 1943 film Doña Bárbara, a film that was almost unanimously celebrated upon its release by critics, that featured revered actor María Félix in the role of Doña Bárbara, and that became a classic of the Mexican cinematographic Golden Age. It discusses the controversies surrounding the casting, the tensions and relationships between the actors both on- and off-screen, and the contrast between María Félix’s androgynous and aloof Doña Bárbara—which for Lehtinen problematizes accepted gender notions and stereotypes—and the film’s celebration of “qualities associated with old-fashioned hombría” (46). The chapter argues that this adaptation offers few surprises in relation to the original novel and that, like it, it became a “pretext” for subsequent film adaptations.Chapter 2 discusses Betty Kaplan’s 1998 film. At the time of its release, the film was heavily criticized due to its melodramatic and hyperbolic nature—which, critics argued, reduced Gallegos’s characters to “one-dimensional caricatures” (62)—the choice of actors of different nationalities for the casting, and Kaplan’s own complicated relationship with and knowledge of Latin American culture. The chapter discusses these elements as well as the discrepancy between the director’s allegedly feminist agenda and the film’s representation of femininity from a distinctively masculine perspective.Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the two telenovela adaptations of Doña Bárbara produced by Spanish-language Latinx network Telemundo: Doña Bárbara (2009) and La Doña (2016). Both, Lehtinen argues, “take unprecedented liberties with the story of Doña Bárbara, making it relevant to the more liberally minded twenty-first century audiences” (89) while still adhering to the thematic underpinnings of the original novel. Lehtinen’s analysis of the two telenovelas pays close attention to how telenovela’s long-winded plot, the changes in the representation of female characters in media produced in the twenty-first century, and the agency audiences acquire through their participation is social media platforms like Facebook impacted the representation of Gallegos’s characters as well as the plot and the setting chosen for the two adaptations.Lastly, the conclusion of Doña Bárbara Unleashed examines the promotional material created for the sequel of La Doña and underscores the attention it pays to Doña Bárbara’s role as mother and avenger. This new focus significantly departs from the romantic relationship between her and Santos Luzardo that was central to Gallegos’s novel and opens up new roads to explore Doña Bárbara’s story in connection with women’s fight against sexual violence and for their basic rights as citizens. Lehtinen ultimately argues that analyzing this sequel and Doña Bárbara’s future transformations on screen will allow us to reach “a better understanding of when and how a film ceases to be an adaptation of a source text and turns into an independent cultural product with its own narrative logic and universe” (150).The dialogue Lehtinen establishes between the four adaptations is greatly enriched by her close and in-depth analysis of several iconic scenes in the films and the telenovelas, as well as by her efforts to locate Doña Bárbara in a global context where it might be productively discussed in connection with adaptions coming from Europe and the United States. Yet, while those connections are important, the readers could have benefitted from one or two additional chapters that would situate the adaptations of Doña Bárbara more carefully in the Latin American context. These chapters could develop fruitful connections between the representations of Doña Bárbara and the representation of other strong female figures that appear in several telenovelas and films across Latin America and expand the dialogue Lehtinen proposes by incorporating critical literature on telenovelas coming from Latin American and Latinx studies. Furthermore, while the author does refer to the social, political, and cultural context surrounding each adaptation—as promised in the introduction—those comments are often reduced to broad claims regarding women rights and social and political violence in Latin America as a whole, or risk being flattened by the author’s references to how women (Latin American and not) are represented on screen in American media. The sociopolitical and cultural context of 1940s Mexico, the migration of Latin Americans to the United States in the 1990s, the continental denunciation of feminicide that started in 2015 through the #NiUnaMenos Movement, and the different strategies and calls for action in the name of women’s reproductive rights that, since 2006, have been spreading across Latin America and in the United States, are indispensable referents to understand the context surrounding the Latin American and Latinx communities that have engaged with and shaped the different representations of Doña Bárbara.As it stands, however, the book is a valuable contribution that opens up the road for future and fascinating studies on the role of audiences in the age of new media, on the elements that, throughout history, have made certain characters of Latin American fiction acquire transnational mobility and international appeal, and on the power adaptations have to not only reflect political, social, and cultural changes, but also to trigger them. It joins a vibrant conversation that will appeal to readers interested in Latin American and Latinx studies, media studies, and adaptation and fandom studies, and that has most recently been enriched by the publication of works such as June Carolyne Erlick’s Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context (2018), Jan Baetens’s The Film Photonovel (2019), Nahuel Ribke’s Translational Latin American Television: Genres, Formats and Adaptations (2020), and Joseph Straubhaar et al.’s From Telenovelas to Netflix: Transnational, Transverse Television in Latin America (2021).
Referência(s)