By Lida Prypchan
Dedicated to Cinema Studio Group’s sixth anniversary on “Tuesday Specials”.
Based on Maria’s Lovers (with Natassja Kinski and John Savage)
A pregnant rat creeps across the end of the bed of an American soldier fighting in Korea. Blond and athletic, with a square jaw and shy smile as if apologizing for laughing, that is Ivan.
Driving along in silence, Ivan’s eyes alight upon an establishment advertising ten year old prostitutes.
His thoughts fly to the image of his girlfriend Maria, a heavily thighed woman with wide mouth and fleshy lips, who would glide around slowly and gracefully wearing the sort of dress that slips down over the hips to below the knees.
Ivan returns from the war and they marry, but the first night, in spite of Maria’s desire to make love and get pregnant, he doesn’t even try – simply tells her “I can’t.” It’s not as if Ivan is impotent – he’s had uninhibited sex with one of his father’s prostitute friends without any problems whatsoever.
I offer three explanations for Ivan’s conflict. First: since this situation takes place in the United States at a time when the virtues of virginity and a woman’s “purity” were extolled, fear of deflowering a virgin. As a result, the man would feel he was violating her purity, a situation that generated further fear. Second: fear of impregnating her. Ivan came from a war where everything he had experienced, especially the act of procreation, caused him to question all aspects of life along the lines of. “Why should I bring another human being into the world just to suffer what I suffered in the war?” Third: his obvious combat neurosis, evidenced by the nightmares where he revisits the horrors he has witnessed – nightmares of the pregnant rat creeping along his bed and crawling into his mouth.
His neurosis consists in denying himself what he wants: to live with Maria and be happy with her. But instead of letting this be, he denies himself the possibility because he is neurotic. Denying himself what he desires, he experiences great pain – which is just what neuroses feed upon.
Later, Maria and Ivan separate, and within a short time she loses her virginity to a musician and gets pregnant. Then, once the deflowering problem is resolved, Ivan goes back to her.
Coming out of the theater, I heard some girls saying: “That’s more common than you’d think.” I didn’t know the frequency of similar situations, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn of them, especially in Latin America where men are raised amid great sexual ambivalence.
On one hand, a male has it instilled into him to marry a very conservative woman who will be ‘the mother of his children” and on the other hand, a father takes his son to have sexual relations with a prostitute – if he hasn’t already had sex with some other woman, that is. Isn’t what he is taught ambivalent and contradictory to how he is encouraged to act? How can a young man in his puberty find any similarity between a prostitute or a tramp and a conservative woman? What conclusion can he draw from this confusion? – that only animals and street walkers can enjoy sex because they are impure and degenerate, while “the mother of his children” is too pure to be allowed to enjoy it. Besides being based on the adage “Raise crows and they’ll peck your eyes out,” these ideas lead to the virtual institutionalization of the Latin American male’s frequently ambiguous love life: the lover-wife relationship. With his wife he has children, tells her his troubles and gets bored, with his lover he goes dancing, tells her his wonderful ideas and makes love.
There’s no reason to blame either the man or the woman. The sad thing is that the situation is mainly due to the woman’s acceptance of suffering and lack of self-appreciation. It’s the nurture-inertia syndrome. Women are raised in this way, then when they begin to realize it, they lack the drive to change their way of thinking, because the ruling force in their lives is inertia.
Final note: For me this article has a double significance, since it represents two events that coincided as if by magic. When I first saw this movie I wrote about it, but my article was never published. Only last Monday I was thinking about Collision andMaria’s Lovers and the next day Collision was on, then two days later Maria’s Lovers was proclaimed one of the best movies in six years of Tuesday specials – so I had another chance to publish the article!
Sooner or later, I told myself, circumstances work out so I can get what I want. I don’t believe I was born to wait. I am by nature an impatient person, but one who realized long ago that Destiny or Fortune intended to satisfy her at a much later date than it had many others – an impatient person who ultimately learnt to be patient. In doing so, I discovered the great advantages in waiting, thus avoiding unnecessary mistakes and maturing in thought as well as in feeling, for it is only with time that you discover what you feel. Time is a sort of all-powerful entity that asks questions before it gives answers and creates the appropriate circumstances for the particular individual who is to experience them at the appropriate moment, or when the right time comes. That’s why forcing something to happen before its time has arrived leaves you desperate and out of sorts, because everything turns out backwards.
You have to allow time to operate on its own, because that’s how it always determines what’s most appropriate. If it denies us something, it is because we are not yet ready to experience it.
