Trotacalles | First Impressions

Two sisters, one a prostitute and one a bourgeois housewife, meet accidentally after many years. Turns out the pimp of one is trying to con the other out of her money. Marriage ends up offering no security and the bourgeois also ends up on the street, like her sister. A female perspective on sex and marriage evoking a great mistrust of the social construction of romantic love. Truly radical for its time, in the way that it so clearly positions marriage as equivalent to prostitution, and makes husbands equivalents to pimps. The third film directed by Matilde Landeta, who had to fight the director’s guild in order to be allowed to direct at all, and who would not direct another film after this one for another forty years. A film to see. Currently screening under the rubric of Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Cinema, on MUBI. With Miroslava, Ernesto Alonso and Elda Peralta.

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