Available to stream from 19 to 21 August at https://stummfilmtage.culturebase.org
The ageing aristocrat Don Mateo meets Conchita, a young dancer, on a train journey and defends her during a heated quarrel with another passenger. Don Mateo soon becomes smitten with Conchita, which she skilfully exploits through deception and mind games. THE WOMAN AND THE PUPPET impresses above all with the performance of its lead actress, Conchita Montenegro, and its stylish look. The novel of the same name by Pierre Louÿs has been adapted for the screen several times and served, among other things, as the basis for Luis Buñuel’s final film, THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977).
Although she is barely 17 in LA FEMME ET LE PANTIN, Conchita Montenegro holds the screen with effortless ease. She is as frisky and as feral as a man-eating tiger cub. Her lover Don Mateo has no hope of ever taming her. What makes the film erotic is the multiplicity of barriers between him and his desire for Concha. As Paola Cristalli, in 2020, writes: “There is always something that stands between Don Mateo’s gaze and the object of his attraction; first, the dividing glass window inside the train; then, during the first encounter at Conchita’s house, a closed door and a candid arm appearing and stretching out, a curtain beyond which the profile of a nude body can be distinguished.”
Dancing in a smoky back room for an audience of salivating men, Conchita Montenegro became the first star in screen history to appear as a full-frontal nude. Her nudity easily predates that of Hedy Lamarr in EXTASE (Gustav Machatý, 1933) or Edwige Feuillère in LUCRÈCE BORGIA (Abel Gance, 1935). Yet the scene is tantalising precisely because we do not see a direct shot of her naked body. She is a shadow cast on a wall, a silhouette glimpsed through a bead curtain, a reflection seen on the surface of an empty champagne bottle. Both literally and figuratively, she has become “that obscure object of desire”.
David Melville Wingrove: From Concha Pérez to Lola Montes, from Cosmopolitanism to Nationalism: the Reinventions of Conchita Montenegro. Elestrellato cinematográfico en España: Actrices bajo el franquismo. I Congreso Internacional. Barcelona 2021
