"Selena" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL March 29, 1997 I wanted very much to like "Selena." I'm a great admirer of some of writer/director Gregory Nava's earlier work such as "El Norte" and, especially, "Mi Familia," both of which deal movingly and profoundly with the Latino immigrant experience in America and Mexican- American family life in its various manifestations. Since there are few other film makers who can get a film in wide distribution focusing their cameras on Chicanos and even fewer on Chicanas, you have to look to Nava for such films. Although there is much to like in this film, in the final analysis this time Nava disappointed me. As I'm sure you know, this is a biopic about Selena Quintanilla (Jennifer Lopez), the reigning queen of Tejano music when she was shot to death in 1995 by a woman who had been the president of Selena's fan club. So screenwriter Nava has a problem from the outset: everyone knows how this film is going to end. To compound the problem, Selena had a very short life and, beside the fact that she had become a huge star both among Mexican-Americans in the U.S. and in Mexico, she didn't do much during her twenysome years except sing and tour with her group that consisted of her sister and brother, augmented later by additional musicians, under the authoritarian eye of her father and manager Abraham (played by Edward James Olmos), himself a failed entertainer. As a result this very long film, excessively long, I thought is, to a very large extent almost a music video. There are lots and lots of musical numbers, some of them that go on for quite a long time (for example the opening sequence that depicts Selena performing to a sell-out crowd in the Houston Astrodome). I like Selena's music well enough, but this is a film for real Selena devotees. I must say that Jennifer Lopez does a great job of lip synching to Selena's own voice and she succeeds in portraying her quite credibly, I thought. There are other ways in which this film is transparently making a bid to sell tickets to the huge Latino following that Selena had. Selena is portrayed as perfect in every way. Talented, smart, loving, family-oriented, down-to-earth, respectful, kind, funny. It's a little much. What I liked best about it were the insights about what it meant to be a Mexican American in South Texas from the 1960s (when Selena's father was trying to make it as a Chicano playing Anglo music) to the present. The Quintanillas did was so many Chicano families did--tried to assimilate into Anglo culture as best they could. They lived in an Anglo suburb of Corpus Christi, send their kids to Anglo schools, spoke English at home because they were Americans not Mexicans, so the only Spanish words their kids learned were words for bodily parts and functions and a few scattered other phrases. And Olmos's character is eloquent if somewhat didactic as he explains that Chicanos live in a cultural as well as a geographical borderland, often looked down on by Anglos as "Mexicans"--often used as an epithet in the Southwest--and looked down on by Mexican nationals as "pochos" who can't even speak decent Spanish. I think, except for the financial benefits that this film will certainly reap in the U.S. and in Latin America, it is really too soon to have made anything but a superficial entertainment film about Selena. To me, the really interesting story here is yet to be told. I wanted to know much more about Yolanda Saldivar, the women who killed Selena, and why. But this film doesn't even make an effort to explore her motivations. Inexplicably it portrays her as much older than the actual Yolanda Saldivar is, if I recall correctly. Terry Castle, a literary critic at Stanford has written a really interesting article about the phenomena of women fans of female opera singers in her book "The Apparitional Lesbian," where she analyzes the homoerotic underpinnings of the phenomenon of adult women idolizing female stars. I would like to have seen this film explore and perhaps contrast the lives and experiences of Selena and the woman who killed her, rather than just writing off Yolanda Saldivar as an embezzler who got caught. But that, of course, could not happen in this film. It would need to be explored in a fiction or fictionalized version of the life of Selena or a character like her. This film doesn't, wouldn't, couldn't even entertain the thought that there might have been even a one-way, unrequited erotic element between Yolanda and Selena. But without something like that we are left with a huge hole in the plot here, since it film doesn't even make an effort to explain why, even if Selena was confronting Yolanda about the missing funds and financial records, it ended with Yolanda shooting her. This silence is ultimately, for someone who's not a dyed in the wool Selena devotee, a major source of dissatisfaction with the shape of Nava's narrative. And Selena becomes on the screen something I'm quite sure she was not in life: a kind of plaster saint. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1996. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.