I am a conquistador in the iron shell. There are good actors who can play any role, so that the viewer does not have the slightest doubt - this character should look like this, and not otherwise. And there are geniuses – those who are completely freed on stage or on set from their “me”, turning into a completely different person. The first are many – they are recognizable, popular, “branded”. The latter almost always remain in the shadows, without creating a style and not being remembered by the viewer, who will remember only the image, but not the one who created it. Everyone remembers Vysotsky’s Hamlet and Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet. They argue which of them is better, admire, raise on a pedestal. But, hand on heart - in both cases, they are first of all good actors in the image of the Prince of Denmark, and only then - Hamlet himself.
Spanish Esperanza Roy each of her roles played so that the viewer only remembered her character. Not her not too memorable face, not bright monologues, not an individuality, which she carefully scrubbed out of the frame every time - only an existing one and a half to two hours of screen time, a person who has no trace of someone else's presence in his celluloid guise. But the images created by the actress remained in memory even in the most passable films, and when she got a role like the unfortunate Rosalia from the film “Silkworm Caterpillars”, the image of a feeble-minded girl who became a hostage of the ambitions of her own family remained before her eyes for many years.
When the Spanish director Javier Aguirre began to film the memoirs of the conquistador-girl Catalina de Eraso, the most difficult task for him was to choose the lead actor. After all, lifetime portraits of the famous adventurer showed the image of a firmly built man with rough facial features, a ruthless look and a complete lack of femininity. In other words, the portraits depicted a stern man capable of putting down several enemies in hand-to-hand combat, single-handedly snatching the regimental banner from the hands of the enemy, killing a dozen opponents in a duel, mercilessly beating a careless opponent in a tavern fight - in short, they did everything to confirm what Catalina herself and the few documents that have come down to us, mainly judicial ones, left testimony.
Catalina de Eraso was only biologically female. This, in fact, was confirmed by the unique bull of Urban VIII, which allowed her to wear men’s clothes and be called a man’s name. In fact, the Pope declared Catalina a man. The easiest way would be to do the same as the Primate of the Holy See, giving this role to a male actor, as the creators of one of the later films did. But the simplest is not the most correct, and Esperanza Roy proved that a real actor can even perform incredible tasks.
Not being able even with the help of makeup artists to portray a portrait resemblance to his heroine, not possessing the physical strength of Catalina, her agility of one of the best fencers of her era, her brutality the actress chose the only correct way out - to become a legendary warrior mentally. You didn't. Only the first few minutes it seems that being next to the on-screen Catalina easily recognizes a woman in her - and then only because the viewer saw the exposition preceding the first adventures of the soldier of fortune Alonso Diaz de Guzman. But after a couple of scenes, that feeling goes away. Disappears and the woman from the image of the conquistador, adventurer and Breter, taking with him a light flair of romanticism of the initial frames.
There was no romance in the life of Catalina / Alonso, no matter how the filmmakers tried to squeeze her into the plot, coming up with a story of teenage love between young Catalina and the novice Ines, who grew up with her in the monastery. A girl dies of tuberculosis in the arms of her friend, who then searches in vain for her image in her many novels. All this, of course, is terribly sentimental and inevitable in a historical-adventure film that claims to be box office, in which the real Catalina, who also worked in the field of marriage scams, would not look too presentable. That’s just hardly in the bright image of youthful love of the monastery novice there is at least some truth.
Of course, it would be interesting if the filmmakers tried to decipher the psychological portrait of their heroine, not leaving it at the mercy of albeit insanely talented, but still a single actress. Unfortunately, no director’s hand is felt here. Aguirre filmed an adventure epic in the spirit of the classic “cloak and sword”, and given that the list of duels Catalina amazed the imagination, the scope for fencing fights, fights and battles opened rich. Where was psychology going to be? The bright image of the untimely gone Ines in the climax moments - and all the short-lived.
But how interesting it would be to try to understand the reasons that made Catalina prove her physical superiority over others over and over again. And even when one of these proofs was her brother, who fell, like dozens of others, from her blade - the real Catalina only wrinkled annoyingly. Run away from justice again! Screen, too, actually. But why? No answer. Just one adventure was replaced by another – in which three travelers wander to the waist in the snow through mountain passes in search of the unknown El Dorado. Esperanza Roy honestly shows her character to who she was - an adrenaline junkie with a broken gender identity. And the director is desperately trying to find some d’Artagnan romance in all this. And in this discrepancy between the level of talent of the actress and the director lies the reason that the picture did not receive proper fame. It still remains a well-made historical and adventure tape with a claim to reliability. But only with a claim. Up to the level shot two years earlier “Flesh and Blood” Verhoeven Aguirre could not reach.