"I, The Worst of All"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                              October 7, 1995

   The Pride Film Festival is entering its final weekend today at the Tampa
 Theater and, due to my travel schedule since the middle of September and an
 unexpected two-day delay in the Frankfurt Airport last week, I have been able
 to review only one film from the entire Festival so far, despite the fact that
 the organizers were kind enough to make a number of preview tapes available to
 me.

    So I definitely want to talk about a film from the Festival today,  One
 very worth your attention is Maria Luisa Bemberg's 1990 film biography of the
 celebrated 17th C. Mexican nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz entitled "I, The
 Worst of All."  (I'm sorry to have to report that Bemberg, Argentina's leading
 feminist filmmaker, passed away earlier this year),  I saw this picture for
 before,  about four years ago while I was visitng Cuba, and while it's true
 that at that performance the one brief kiss exchanged between Sor Juana
 (Assumpta Serna)and the Vicereine (Dominique Sanda) evoked shocked reactions
 from some members of the Havana audience, the fact that this film, now with
 subtitles, is showing up all over the country in gay film festivals
 is a bit surprising to me.  While Sor Juana and the Vicereine undoubtedly were
 in love with one another and Sor Juana wrote adoring love poetry to her and
 wore her picture around her neck, we do not know if they were ever lovers in a
 physical sense (the film implies they were not). So, with the memory of
 the rude treatment that the lust-loving Pride Film Festival audience gave last
 year to "Salmonberries" when it didn't provide the kind of hot sex scenes they
 were looking for, I rather fear for the receiption Sor Juana's going to get
 when the film is screened this afternoon at 2:30.

    But those who are interested in the whole life, not just the sex life, of
 one of the most remarkable female feminist poets and philosophers who ever
 lived and those who take an interest in filmmaking and the work of outstanding
 women directors, "I, The Worst of All" has much to offer.  Based on Mexican
 Nobel Prize- winning author Octavio Paz's book Traps of Faith, the film makes
 use of flashbacks within a somewhat complicated plot structure to present the
 details of Sor Juana's life from her apparently illigitemate birth in 1648 to
 her death from the plague in 1695.  Much of the dialogue that Sor Juana speaks
 in the film is taken directly from her writings which include not only poetry,
 but letters, plays, and philosophical and theological writings as well.
  What emerges is the picture of a young girl who taught herself to read at
 three and who, from an early age, was determined to do all that she could
 possibly do to lead a life in pursuit of knowledge.  Her childhood solution
 was that she would dress up as a man and attend the university when she
 grew up.  When her mother sent her to live with rich uncles in Mexico City
 she had the opportunity to gain prodigious knowledge and was even subjected to
 a public examination conducted by the leading scholars of her day--in which
she fielded all the questions put to her.  As a young lady-in-waiting in the
 Viceroy's court, she was pressured to participate in social life and to
receivethe attentions of courtiers, which distracted her from her passion for
 learning.  Since she was adamant that she would not marry and have children,
 and since a career as an academic was closed to her, she entered the convent,
 convinced by her confessor that there would be no incompatibility between
 religious life
 and her insatiable passion for knowledge and writing.  And indeed, there was
 none, at first.  Her fame as a writer and scholar grew and extended to Spain
 and beyond.  She held what amounted to a literary and scholarly salon in her
 convent rooms where she kept the largest library in the New World and the
 latest in scientific instruments, gifts from her admirers..

    But Sor Juana was caught up in the power struggles between Mexico's the
 secular rulers, the Viceroys sent from Spain to be the secular rulers of
 Mexico, and the ecclesiastical ruler the Archbishop during the age of the
 Inquisition.  When the new Viceroy and his wife "adopt" Sor Juana and protect
 her, the fanatically misogynistic new Archbishop pursues his agenda of
 reforming the convents and of breaking Sor Juana's spirit, forcing her, in the
 end, to renounce all that she held dear and to declare, in blood, that she was
 "the worst of all."

   Bebmerg's filming of all this is utterly appropriate to the material.  There
 is a kind of rigid, static quality to many of the shots that seems to mirror
 the stark rigidity of the society, but it is punctuated with unsettling
 outbursts of irrationality and excess.  "I, The Worst of All" compels
attention
 and serves as a fitting monument to the first woman philosopher of the New
 World.  (By the way, I have just finshed editing a book about women in the
 history of philosophy tht will be out next year.  It's called  HYPATIA'S
 DAUGHTERS; 1,500 YEARS OF WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS and it contains a nice article by
 Don Beggs of Mills College called "Sor Juana's Feminism.")

       For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women
 and Film.

   Copyright 1995 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.  Please do
not reprint this review without the permission of the author.