La Llorona (2019) with Vanessa Guerrero

On the Bechdel cast, the questions asked if movies have women in them. Are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands, or do they have individualism? The patriarchy's effin' vast. Start changing it with the Bechdel cast.

Ooh, an intro for this, Jamie. I don't really have anything.

I can teach you how to say hello in Kakichel.

Oh, hell yeah. Okay, let's do it.

Oots a witch.

Oops, a witch.

That's enough.

We did it?

Yeah. We did it. Yay.

Welcome to the Bechdel cast. Hola.

Bienvenidos.

Welcome.

We are the Bechdel cast. My name is Caitlin Durante.

My name is Jamie Loftus. And this is the show where we take your favorite movies and talk about them from an intersectional feminist lens. Using the Bechdel test as a jumping off point. But Caitlin, what is that?

What is it?

Oh, I'll tell you. It is a media metric created by a friend of the pod, Alison Bechdel.

Of course.

Our best friend, of course. And there are many different versions of the test. The one that we use is do two characters of a marginalized gender have names? Do they speak to each other? And is their conversation about something other than a male? We like it when it's narratively meaningful conversation and not just throwaway dialogue. The movie we're talking about today, first of all, very excited to get into it.

Yes.

And also, I mean, Bechdel's test, not a problem.

Not a problem.

And also so many bigger conversations to have.

Yes.

I was like, let's just get it out of the way.

It passes. Yeah.

But there's so much more to talk about. And we have an incredible returning guest. What is, is this maybe appearance four or five?

It is six. Six?

Oh my God.

Yeah, we were just counting off mic.

Wow.

She is a writer, comedian, formerly of G4. And you remember her from our episodes on Raw, from Dusk Till Dawn, Atomic Blonde, Bound, and Made in Manhattan. Never forget. it's Vanessa Guerrero.

Yay that's the episode where Jamie gave me a four loco.

Yes oh my gosh were we ever so young.

Back when my body could still process something like that.

Oh my gosh welcome back I I feel like the gosh I forgot about the bound episode I think about I think about the raw episode often that was a life changer for me oh.

My gosh I yeah same Today's movie, so we're talking about La Llorona from 2019, not to be confused with another 2019 movie called The Curse of La Llorona. I, oh my God, I was just telling everyone off mic listeners that I had a dream.

I watched the wrong movie and I really woke up feeling it in my whole body, horrifying. Has anyone seen The Curse of La Llorona?

No. No. Yes. My parents have. Okay.

I watched it while I was prepping for this episode because I was curious. And I have some things to say about it, which I'll share later. Interesting. Yeah. But yeah, no, today's movie is La Llorona, a Guatemalan production from writer-director Jairo Bustamante.

Yes. Vanessa.

Vanessa.

Tell us about your relationship to this movie, and then if you have any sort of relationship to the folkloric figure of La Llorona.

Yeah, absolutely. I have a big relationship with this movie. I've written about it before. I have forced my entire family to watch it, to rave reviews. The movie is based off of something that actually happened with Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt. My... My mother, grandmother went through it and hearing the stories of what it was like at the time. And I actually just found out literally today a plot point of the movie is people being disappeared by the government. My grandmother's stepfather was a revolutionary at the time and he disappeared without a trace.

Wow.

Yes. Tomás Guerrero. No relation to the Guerreros on my side of the family, just a coincidence. But because of that, I have a really intense relationship with this movie because it takes a story from my childhood that usually was told from the lens of like a traitor that like willingly slept with a colonizer. Because that's usually how the Yoruna story is told. A woman hooked up the colonizer and then he left her and then she drowned the kids.

and turned it on its head into a story of, like, indigenous revenge. And not only that, but it's, like, so well-researched. One of the consultants is Rigoberta Menchú, and she's even in the courtroom scene. Oh, wow.

I didn't know that.

Yes. She's one of the Maya women sitting in the background in the courtroom scene. That's her cameo. And you get so few Guatemalan productions. Like, I have uncles that even made, like, movies in Guatemala, except they were, like, Blue Demon and the Seven Mummies. Awesome. Which is great. Still great.

It still rocks.

Should we cover that on the podcast?

Yeah. You can only watch it on a really shitty YouTube upload.

I didn't know you were Blue Demon and the Seven Mummies nepotism. What a lore drop.

It's so rare that we get Guatemalan productions, so something of this caliber was huge for us.

Yeah, it was in the festival rotation.

It got nominated for an Academy Award.

And it's a terrific movie, so I understand why. Jamie, what about you? What's your relationship, if any?

This was my first viewing. It is a classic Vanessa Guerrero brings a movie on I've never seen and it changes my life kind of situation. I think this is maybe the third or fourth time that's happened. Raw, Bound, and now La Llorona. Yeah, I was aware of the myth. I mean, I wasn't aware of all the permutations of the myth. I enjoyed learning all the different versions of the myth. And knowing, because I was aware of a similar version of the myth that you were, Vanessa. And so going into this, I was like, okay. what's he going to do with this? What's he going to do with it? And I was so, I mean, I'm very excited to get into it. I think this movie does, it's like one of the best elevated horror movies I

think I've seen in a very long time. And just the way that it turns the myth on its head. And I mean, it just, I don't know. I'm very excited to get into it. This was my first movie of his. This was my first viewing, excited to learn more about Bustamante's work. Caitlin, what about you?

I had never seen it before either. And I would say this was my first time meaningfully engaging with any media about La Llorona folklore. I was familiar with her as a folkloric figure, but I hadn't watched any movies or engaged with any other media about her. So I wasn't sure what to expect. I watched this movie, loved it, then watched The Curse of La Llorona, didn't love it.

And then I watched this movie again. And that was after I had done more research about the history of the genocide in Guatemala.

Which, as with many, many genocides that the U.S. is an integral part of, I did not learn about in school in any meaningful way.

I think maybe it.

Was touched on, but it was, I mean, particularly for listeners who also do not really know very much about it. We'll talk about it, obviously, at length in this episode. But this genocide continued into most of our lifetimes, into the 90s. It's one of the many times of U.S.

Involvement just fucking shit up in Guatemala. Because then we also have the United Fruit Co. when they destabilized our economy. And then after they kicked out the doctor that was experimenting on the Tuskegee Airmen, he experimented on Guatemalans. The U.S. loves to meddle in our shit.

And of course, it's only a hop, skip and a jump to find out Israel also involved. So really the whole genocidal axis of evil. Yeah, we'll cover this in more depth in this episode. But just the way that it works in this movie so effortlessly. Obviously this movie came out years later, but it reminded me in terms of the eeriness of the zone of interest a little bit.

In terms of setting and rich evil people ignoring evil. suffering people just outside their doors. And I just, I'm very excited to talk about it.

Same.

Yeah. Should we take a quick break and then come back for the recap?

Let's do it.

And we're back. And here is the recap for La Llorona. First, we will place a content warning here for genocidal violence. We meet a man named General Enrique Monteverde, played by Julio Diaz. We will come to learn that he is a powerful, wealthy, former dictator of Guatemala. He is discussing an upcoming trial with some other men, though we're not yet sure what it's about. We meet Monteverde's family, his wife Carmen, played by Margarita Canafique, their daughter Natalia, Sabrina de la Hoz, and Natalia's daughter, Sarah, who seems to be about 12 years old, I think. And then we also meet some of Monteverde's staff of workers in his house, housekeepers and the like. One of them is Valeriana, played

by Maria Talon. It's worth noting that Monteverde and his family are white and And most, if not all, of the workers are indigenous, specifically Mayan Ixchil, and they speak, oh, let me see if I can pronounce this.

A lot of Mayan words are really, really difficult because they are sounds we do not make anymore. Like we have city names that are like, ooh, I got to take a quick head start before that one. Like Huehuetenango. Yes.

Yeah, I struggle a bit. Anyway, one night Monteverde wakes up to what sounds like a woman crying. He also hears water running in the bathroom because the bathtub is randomly running. We'll put a little pin in that, some water motifs. He grabs a gun from his arsenal and starts kind of snooping around the house to investigate. He almost accidentally shoots his wife Carmen. The workers come running.

Everyone's freaking out.

He stays shooting his family.

Yes.

And I was, this isn't a criticism, but I was like, thankfully he has apparently terrible aim. He rarely seems to connect even at close range.

Right.

But he stays shooting the women in his family.

He really does.

Yeah.

And he says, I shot a gun because I heard a woman crying.

Natural response.

Reasonable response.

A woman crying. Shoot her. Yeah.

No one else in the house, however, heard this woman crying. And so there's mention of him getting old. Maybe he has dementia. Then we cut to the trial that he was preparing for. During the trial, a Mayan woman is testifying that Monteverde's soldiers attacked, raped, brutalized, and killed many members of her community. And we pieced together that Monteverde is on trial for committing a genocide in the early 1980s, one that seemed to specifically target indigenous people, where one third of the Mayan Ischial population in Guatemala were murdered, and 38% of those victims were children under the age of 12. This is also what happened in real Guatemalan history, which again, we'll get into. So that's what he's on

trial for. The defense claims that Monteverde's army only attacked guerrilla fighters, that no civilians were killed, and that no particular race, ethnicity, or religious group were targeted. And then Monteverde pleads not guilty. The court, however, finds him guilty of committing a genocide. In the aftermath of this verdict, Monteverde has a medical emergency and is taken to the hospital where his family discusses the outcome. His daughter Natalia expresses that she believes the survivors of the genocide who testified against her father, but Carmen thinks that's outrageous and She believes this is all false and that those women who testified were paid to lie.

I believe when they interview the final person testifying, it's like 82. There are so many women who appear to testify at this.

Oh, the 82nd person.

Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Mm hmm.

Yeah.

Then we find out that the constitutional court has annulled the trial and overturned the verdict of Monteverde being guilty of committing a genocide. So he is able to return home to the dismay of hundreds of people who are outside of his home protesting the impunity of it all. He looks out into the crowd of protesters and sees a young Mayan woman who is ominously staring at him.

And she turns out to be the new maid, since most of Monteverde's other workers quit, aside from the head housekeeper, Valeriana, and a guy named Latona, who is Monteverde's bodyguard, I think. This new maid is Alma, played by Maria Mercedes Caroy, who came from the same village that Valeriana is from.

So that's how she got the job. or so we are led to believe. As soon as Alma arrives, strange things start happening. Water faucets randomly turn on. She has a loose frog that she's carrying around. She's always submerging her face in water and encouraging Natalia's daughter, Sarah, to do the same thing, saying that she's teaching Sarah to hold her breath and Sarah takes a liking to Alma and relays to her mom that Alma mentioned that she had two children. But they died. And we'll put a pin in that. By the way, there is still a large group of protesters outside of Monteverde's house. And it seems like they're there like 24-7.

One of my favorite details.

Yes.

They never leave.

It's such a good thing in sound design that there's always just the hum of angry protesters in the background.

Yes. A good reminder, as if we needed it, that protest works everywhere. you will drive your oppressor out of their mind.

Yeah.

But yeah, the sound design in this movie is fucking incredible.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

I mean, audio, visually, like everything about this movie is awesome.

Yeah.

Anyway, so the protesters are there at all hours. And so it's too dangerous for the family to leave. And so they're all confined to the house for Not sure exactly how long, days, maybe weeks. One night, Monteverde notices Alma taking a spooky midnight swim. Then he follows her into the staff living quarters where Alma is naked and washing her dress in the overflowing bathtub. So there's water all over the floor. The family finds Monteverde watching her and he has an erection. So there's another like, what the hell is this old man doing kind of freak out moment. Then Carmen tells Natalia that, that throughout their marriage, her husband always had a habit of going after indigenous women in a predatory, fetishizing way. And then she reveals

that she thinks that Monteverde is Valeriana's father. making valeriana natalia's half-sister meanwhile the family being confined to the house is taking a toll on various family members health monteverde has bronchitis and needs an oxygen tank to help him breathe carmen develops conjunctivitis.

They have the jk rowling black mold oh yes situation.

Yeah that happens a little later um Before that, Carmen starts having a series of nightmares where she is in a rural area with two small children. And she seems to be in either the middle of the genocide or some similar brutal attack. But she's having to flee and protect her children and different things during these nightmares. Meanwhile, the protesters are still outside, but they've gone quiet now, and they're just staring at the house. It's very eerie.

This is when Monteverde finds what looks like mold on the wall behind a bed frame. Valeriana says it's black magic, and she performs a Mayan cleansing ritual on him. Then while she and Alma are scrubbing the mold, Valeriana is like, So I talked to the people in the village and none of them know who you are. So who are you and where are you really from? And Alma says that she's from the deepest part of the mountain near the water and near a military base and that she was there until the killings began. But remember, that was in 1982 and the movie takes place in 2019. 2019 but Alma doesn't look to be any older than like 25 so the math ain't quite mathing and Valeriana is like wait a minute how old are you and Alma

says that she doesn't remember and then one night Latona the bodyguard guy wakes up to the sound of a woman crying so he grabs a gun and starts searching the house and discovers two young children perhaps these are Alma's dead children and Meanwhile, Natalia's daughter, Sarah, is tiptoeing around. She goes into Monteverde's room, disconnects his oxygen tank, goes outside with it, and kind of walks into the pool with it. Monteverde wakes up, realizes that something is wrong, goes outside with his gun. He sees Alma submerge herself in the pool, and he shoots her, but again, it's actually Sarah who he shoots, so... shooting another family member.

He grazes her arm, but she's okay. Carmen, Natalia, and Valeriana come running. They manage to get the gun away from Monteverde and sedate him. And then they see a bunch of people, children and adults, all indigenous, standing on their lawn. The implication is that they are the ghosts or spirits of the people who were killed in the genocide.

And so Valeriana does another ritual with candles. She's calling upon her ancestors to protect her Carmen, Natalia, and Sarah saying that whatever Monteverde did, we had nothing to do with it. We're innocent. So don't harm us. Then Carmen goes into a trance state and starts having a kind of dreamlike vision, similar to her recent nightmares. where again, she is being brutalized by soldiers. The two small children are there with her again. And it's clear that Carmen is there in place of Alma. What we're seeing is what happened to Alma. Carmen then watches the soldiers drown the two children. And then we get a reveal that Monteverde is there ordering these killings. And then he shoots and kills Alma. And then Carmen responds by grabbing Monteverde

and strangling him. And then we cut back to the house and we see that Carmen has strangled her husband to death. A funeral is held. A man attending the funeral goes into the restroom. This is, I think, a military general, an associate of Monteverde. And he hears a woman crying as the bathroom floor starts flooding with water.

And we get the sense that Alma, or La Llorona, is going to haunt and kill all of the people responsible for the genocide. The end.

And then it ends with the song Llorona by Chabela Vargas, but it's in this haunting key. Yeah, yes. Played with Guatemalan marimba, which I had when I was a child and I was very bad at. Oh, wow.

It's a beautiful instrument. You know, I love it. Maybe that would add to the eeriness of the ending is a poorly executed marimba.

Child play.

Yes.

Well, that's the movie.

Let's take another quick break and we'll come back to discuss.

Yes, so much to discuss with this movie. Vanessa, is there anything jumping out to you? Where would you like to start?

I would definitely like to start with one thing this movie portrays is how aware Guatemalans, both mestizo and indigenous, were of the genocides as they were happening. It portrays the fact that If you're Guatemalan, you're angry about this, whether you're indigenous or not. This is like a grave injustice that has happened. And I asked my mother and grandmother what it was like at the time. Like, did you know what was happening? Like what information was being fed to you? And they were like, we were aware, but we were also like threatened if we intervened. Like if you said something, it wasn't just you that was being threatened. It was your entire family. Like my mom has a memory of intervening when some people, some mestizo

people were beating up an indigenous guy. And my mom intervened because she's freakishly strong. She's been an athlete her whole life. And she remembers as soon as making shushu is okay. sprinting home because she was like, if someone sees that I did something like it's going to be all of us. And the propaganda was as such that when Rios Montt was up for reelection, there were like little jingles of Guatemalan children in the street being like, my mommy's voting for Rios and my daddy's voting for Rios.

And if I could, I would too. And it didn't work for the second reelection because by that point, Guatemalans were fucking pissed.

Well, and he got overthrown in a coup, right? Like he didn't even make it to an election. That is all very fascinating.

Yeah. I mean, the history connected to this film, I feel not well-versed enough in it. So I apologize to our listeners for not having enough knowledge about it. But what I do know is that, again, this was a genocide, an indigenous genocide that went on for decades. And also it's worth mentioning that because we are seeing so many historic parallels, because genocides tend to work in the same way and gaslight people, people and erase history in much the same way that yes, Mont is behind this, but you cannot do this without the support of, of other genocidal powers.

Yes.

And so there's, I mean, there's no shortage of writing and it's been, you know, well documented how involved the CIA particular was in, And one thing this movie does so well is show these different shades of complicity within this home where, you know, very obviously you have the perpetrator, you have Enrique, but you also have the ways that Carmen is party to this and the way that she has to constantly delude herself into to her own detriment as well. Not that that barely matters, but like, and how his daughter is complicit, but also questioning. And his granddaughter, even more, I mean, it's just, it is a fascinating kind of portrayal of the ways that a family with this kind of power needs to dehumanize the people they

profit from massacring. Like it's, yeah.

Yeah.

I'm excited to get more into that. I'm wondering if it makes sense to go over a brief history as it relates to the events of the movie slash the things that the movie is referencing. I've compiled a small section here. Vanessa, feel free to jump in if I'm missing anything or getting anything wrong.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Because I am by no means an expert on this. But basically, the character in the movie, Enrique Monteverde, as you said, is based on Efrain Rios Montt, who was the president slash dictator of Guatemala from 1982 to 83. He was a career army officer who became the leader of the country when a group of military officers led a coup in 1982 against the then president, Romeo Lucas Garcia, and then they installed Rios Montt as a military dictator.

This was happening kind of smack in the middle of the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 to 96, as we said, it was a war fought between the government and leftist revolutionaries, primarily over land distribution because wealthy white European descended Guatemalans, as well as companies like the United Fruit Company, like you mentioned, Vanessa, stole land from indigenous people.

Excellent book about it, by the way, called Bitter Fruit.

Ooh, okay, good to know.

Okay, we'll link that.

Bitter Fruit is a fantastic book on what the United Fruit Company did in Guatemala.

Okay, I am very keen to read that. Also, calling this a war is a little eh, because it was mostly state violence against civilians. Indigenous people were disproportionately displaced, disappeared, or killed, especially when Rios Montt was in power. because he deliberately led a genocide against the Mayan population. And then, as we mentioned, he was overthrown in another coup staged by his defense minister about a year and a half after he was put in power. But after that, Rios Montt stayed in politics. He was involved with the Congress of Guatemala for a while, which granted him legal immunity from the lawsuits against him, alleging that he committed war crimes while he was the leader in the early 80s.

But this immunity ended in 2012 when his legislative term expired. And so a year after that, in 2013, he was sentenced to 80 years in prison for crimes against humanity and genocide. But the constitutional court annulled his sentence and then he was supposed to have a retrial. But before that could happen or before it could finish, he died of a heart attack in April of 2018. Or was he murdered by La Llorona?

Yeah. I can only hope. Truly.

It was like the very least you can hope is that it was extremely fucking painful.

Yes.

Yeah.

So, yeah, just brief history lesson. This is all information that I admittedly did not really know very much at all about.

Most people don't. It's not... Not a ton of people know much about Guatemala. Usually when I'm Latina, the first thing is, oh, you're Mexican. And then I'm like, no, let me explain about this tiny little country that the U.S. keeps interfering into. And I've hosted cooking classes for Guatemalan cooking along Los Angeles. Or I'm even trying to figure out how I can host tours where I can show people parts of Guatemala that aren't the parts of Antigua where you're all buying... Timu worry dolls. There isn't a ton of education about Central America, especially in Los Angeles, because the primary Latin American person that you meet is Mexican.

And most people assume because these countries touch that they have a lot in common. But in fact, Guatemalan, both Guatemalan politics and also Guatemalan history is really different because we've got like Mayan, Isiel Garufa. We've, got more in common with the caribbean than we do with like.

Mexico interesting i didn't realize it's.

The coastal parts we love our plantains.

Yeah this is this is just uh not something that i i was really taught about at all in a way that um i feel like we found so many times on this show and is Yet another reason that if you do live somewhere where this is not going to be prioritized in spite of it being a very important, impactful part of history that was going on when you were alive, which just is absurd.

Yeah.

That movies like La Llorona become so valuable and, and not just, I mean, I'm trying to think of another example of a movie we've covered on the show that is doing all of this lifting in a really effortless way, because it's, it's not as if, you know, Bustamante is, um, going out of his way to like handhold his audience by any means, but it integrates so cleanly into the story he's telling. And, um, yeah i'm grateful to this movie on many counts yeah including it just being a really really good beautiful tense movie that doesn't i don't know like this is this is kind of a separate thing but doesn't even need jump scares i saw some criticisms around like there's not enough jump scares i'm like

It doesn't need it. It doesn't need it.

It's all about the vibes and the aura of the scene.

Because it's very eerie.

It creates tension through mood. Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Anyways, all that to say that to be operating on that level and be telling a very important and under-discussed, particularly in the U.S. area of history, is so unreal.

Mm-hmm.

I'm also I'm curious because I also had to do a bunch of research on the mythology and folklore around La Llorona. But I'm curious how how common of a legend it is in Guatemala.

So I'm Guatemalan and Salvadorian. In El Salvador, she has a slightly different name, and I'm going to say it wrong because I only learned this word recently. Sí, Guanaba. They're pretty similar stories to Llorona in El Salvador. In Guatemala, it's everywhere. It's used to keep... In fact, sometimes Guatemalans are surprised when I tell them it's not a Guatemalan story.

And I'm like, no, no, all of Latin America has a version of this. It's primarily used... To keep your children home at night and to keep them away from bodies of water. And I can't think of one Guatemalan child that hasn't had an aunt or uncle go, I'm a seahorse in the dark and scare the shit out of us. Oh, boy.

That's awesome.

And now I do it to my nieces and nephews. I'll wait until the lights are off or they're in the shower and I'll just pull one of those rocks. It's like. For some reason, Latin America loves horror stories to keep your children into behaving. My mom has a lullaby that's basically like, go to sleep with a coyote, he's going to eat you. We've got La Llorona. We've got El Sombrero, which is like a man with a large hat that comes into town and he braids your hair and you're hopelessly in love with him and you waste away as he disappears. Oh, wow. Which is, like, our way of keeping young women away from strange men wandering into town. Sure. A lot of, like, these folktales are primarily used to, like, scare your children into behaving.

I mean, that's a classic.

Yeah.

My neighbors have kids, and they invented... They invented a fictional character named Officer Chan. If you invoke Officer Chan in front of any of these children, they are in bed in like two seconds.

Wow.

Because one day I was like, wait, who's Officer Chan? They're like, he's not real. He's not real. He's just a man.

Well, he sounds like a cop.

I mean, yes. And the children are terrified of him. Yeah, yeah.

Well, to get a little bit more into the legend, the folklore surrounding La Llorona.

Yes.

So there's a lot that plays into this mythology. There are also different versions of the story depending on the region or the interpretation of it.

Or it seems like even like the time, like the story changes over time as well.

Yes.

From my understanding... And again, Vanessa, feel free to jump in here. But the basic and I think most common version of the story is that several hundred years ago, a young, beautiful indigenous woman fell in love with a handsome man of a higher status. Seems like it's like white colonizer vibes.

Yes.

They had two children together, but one day he abandoned her for another woman and wanted to take their children with him. So in a fit of like rage and despair, the beautiful woman drowned her children in a river, but then immediately realized the horror of what she had done and ended her own life also by drowning. And now she is said to be a ghostly presence with long black hair, dressed in a white gown, and she roams near bodies of water, crying for and looking for her children.

And she is... Is it that she... is thought to like take whatever children she finds in case they might be her children. Is that the idea?

Yes.

Right.

She takes children thinking it's her children.

Right.

And an interesting thing to note about these stories is a lot of these stories are like, don't sleep with the colonizer. But another part of these stories are usually demonifying something an indigenous woman does to discredit them and make them feel like this, like, heathen like other that would behave in a way that we would not. And that's where a lot of these stories come from. Same thing with the idea of like a cop, like sleeping with the colonizer as he comes in. It was often a warning given to young women that, And it's interesting to see how this iteration almost always leads to, oh, and then she went crazy.

Right, yes.

Yeah, the whole, I mean, I feel like, Vanessa, you probably know so much more than we do about the woman going mad stereotypes and the good versions of it, the bad versions of it, but that that is so inherent to what this myth is. is I really love what Bustamante does with it. I think it's like, it's so, it's so smart. And so, you know, she becomes representative of so many mothers who are just trying to survive with their children. And I think like turning her into, you know, and every woman exacting revenge is so fucking cool.

Yes, exactly. It's also interesting how prevalent this myth is in the United States and to see the different ways it's interpreted because last year I took my niece to Halloween Horror Nights and they had a like Latino myth maze and through every single one she was like haha cool and then we get to the Yorona room and she's like.

No not this one this one's real oh that rocks also in my research so there were also like similar figures of ghostly beings who cry by rivers existing in folklore and mythology from pre-Columbian indigenous Mesoamerican cultures.

So there are different theories about how the figure of La Llorona became the legend that it is today. Once again, I'm not an expert on this, but there's kind of these different theories. There's different interpretations of the legend. So I'll just go through a few of them. One is that the woman, the man and their children really existed.

The children died in some way. And then the story was told over and over again throughout the generations until it was like imbued with folkloric qualities and then became legend. Another kind of theory is that existing mythology was like mapped onto a real person and So in this case, specifically the mythology of the Mexica goddess Quejua Cotol. I'm sure I did not pronounce that correctly.

You actually got pretty close.

Did I?

Oh, wow. Yay. Her mythology is superimposed onto the story of La Melinche. For anyone who doesn't know, La Melinche is the Nahua woman who served as the interpreter for Hernan Cortes during... the Spanish conquest. She also had a baby with him, but their son was taken away from her and sent to Spain to get an education. And La Malinche is a complicated figure. She has been viewed as a traitor, but also as a kind of victim of circumstance and colonization. We don't have time to get into it, but she's relevant because she's often kind of conflated with La Llorona or like Her story is sort of like mapped on to the legend of La Llorona, things like that. And then another approach or kind of like interpretation of the La Llorona legend is that it

is a metaphor for... the conquistadors brutalizing and colonizing the indigenous people and their land, which is the approach that Jairo Bustamante takes with this film. A different approach is taken in The Curse of La Llorona from 2019. Let me tell you what.

Yeah, I was like, I'm seeing that Linda Cardellini is the star of.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

So I guess let me just take a little detour and briefly touch on this.

So.

the way that movie characterizes the La Llorona figure is very, very different from the movie we're talking about today.

The conjuring universe withing something. I've never heard of such a thing.

Right.

So this movie really emphasizes like her jealousy that she, she drowned her children in a fit of, in a, in like a jealous fit of rage and, and then is consumed with grief and guilt, and then haunts the Linda Cardellini character and her two young children. Oh my God.

Yes.

And it really leans into the hag-like appearance. Sure. Again, the jealous woman trope. She's pure evil with kind of no context. There's basically no nuance here, especially when you compare it to the Alma character. From the Bustamante film. Also, it's like, why does a movie about a figure from Latin American folklore have a protagonist who is a white American non-Latina woman? And then the two characters who are foils to her are Latina women. So you really have to question that.

Anyway. I mean, and it's, and it's also, I mean, this is like tale as old as time. You'll never believe which movie got more marketing, got on more screens, got seen by more people. The Curse of La Llorona, Conjuring style, starring Linda Carly, sorry, I can't get over the Linda Carly, all due respect to her, made over a hundred million dollars. And so it again, when we're talking about like how movies, you know, I always, I think all three of us are probably the same camp here of like, I always chafe so much on it's not that deep because while occasionally true, it very often is that deep. And the movies that are put in front of people and what they're saying is that deep.

And this is an interesting case study that these two movies who came out the same year, One of them is made by a Guatemalan filmmaker who is really interacting with and interrogating the myth. It is like an effortless lesson in history. It's tense. It's amazing. And then there's like Pee Pee Poo Poo directed by Mike. I'm pretty sure.

What's his name?

Michael Chavez.

Yeah.

I mean, whatever. Maybe he's great. But all that to say, you know, which stories get put in front of wide audiences and which don't. It is that deep.

Yeah.

Man, that sounds... Brave of you to watch that, Caitlin. That sounds really... It was....

On top of just, like, leaning into tropes, it's also just a bad movie. Like, so much of the story logic doesn't make sense. So much of, like, characters' reactions to things make no sense. It's absurd.

Yay. Yeah. I think a big barrier to people watching this as well is that people are still very weird about watching movies in a different language. Yeah. Because they require more attention. And also a movie like this that has both like Spanish and indigenous languages in it, like it might be a little bit harder to grasp, but like.

As someone that enjoys international movies, although I don't count this one because I just understand it. But as someone that enjoys international movies, you're missing a lot on pieces of history you wouldn't have understood otherwise by not being willing to read subtitles.

Yeah, by not being willing to put your fucking phone down for an hour and a half, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah, and this movie is on, I mean, it's on Criterion. It's available to stream for if you haven't seen it and you're listening to this episode. Please, for crying out loud, watch it. It is very easy to watch. There's a number of free ways to watch it.

I think it's on Shudder, too.

It is, yes.

Yes.

And it's also on something called Sling? I don't know. It's on a bunch of stuff.

Feminist icon sling thank you i'm sure the sling.

Uh but yeah that's um that's really frustrating to hear because yeah again like vanessa there's like so many factors of like why doesn't a movie like this get seen in english-speaking countries and it's also just because I think, and I would like blame executives for that too, that executives think that English speaking audiences don't quote unquote want to read when you see that there, when there are international movies that do well in the U S that aren't in English, they do really well.

It's like, look at parasite.

Yes, exactly. I was going to say like so much of, I don't know. I mean, I do blame individuals, but so much with, with, especially with like entertainment is just like a bunch of fucking guys in a boardroom. Assuming they know what people want and being wrong 100% of the time.

They have such a low opinion. Like, if you're listening to this, you should be mad that executives have such a low opinion of you. You should be mad that these people think that you want drivel.

That you want the curse of La Llorona and not La Llorona. Yeah.

Yeah, truly. Because their assumptions are usually... racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, the list goes on.

And when a movie does get through, without fail, I mean, I think the big, big example in the U.S. that reminds me most recently is our conversation about sinners and how every Ryan Coogler movie that comes out, executives are like, I don't know, do people want... black stories from a black director and the movie makes a hundred trillion dollars and is really good every single fucking time. And I want to believe it will not happen again, but it's just, it keeps happening every five years. We have to remember that people actually do like women protagonists if the movie doesn't suck. Uh, Like, it's just, it's ridiculous.

Yeah.

I watched an interview with the director, Jairo Bustamante, and he talks a little bit about his inspiration and approach to writing and directing this movie and So basically, he wanted to tell a story about the state silencing and erasing the genocide that happened in his country. And he wanted this to be a movie that would appeal to an international audience as well as a local one. So he conducted a market research study and found that Guatemalan audiences were most commonly watched horror movies and superhero movies.

So he decided to take the figure of La Llorona, who is, depending on who you ask, regarded as a superhero and a horror figure, and basically use her as the vessel to tell this story about silencing genocide. And then later in the interview, he acknowledges the misogyny present in this legend because it's, you know, a scorned woman who's always crying, partly because a man left her. And so I wanted to pull a quick quote. He says it in Spanish, but this is translated to English. He says, it was time to make a vigilante out of her and make her cry for something more relevant than a man.

And I was like, hell yeah.

Wow.

Okay. Shout out to Ally Jairo Bustamante.

Yeah.

I mean, I love the character changes. The fact that he did market research, man, that's indie filmmaking, like 5D chess. That's awesome.

Right.

Yeah.

And then just talking about the movie itself.

Yeah, let's talk about the characters because this movie is, I mean, primarily its central cast is women processing the genocidal crimes of their patriarch or refusing to process the genocidal crimes of their patriarch.

Yes.

All in very different ways.

And I think especially the scene where Sarah is talking to Natalia and she's like, hey, the kids at school are saying grandpa did bad things. And you can like see that Natalia both like believes it, but she's trying to talk her out of it where it's like, yeah, she's complicit too. And like, we didn't even get to the fact that like Natalia's husband and Sarah's father was a man that disappeared. Right. And she like, she's directly affected by this and she's choosing to like live in the riches of her father's labor and in the benefits of what he had done for her, even though like, the man she loved disappeared for speaking up.

Is that what happened? I wasn't totally sure what the implications were there.

Yes, because she finds the piece of paper and she like realizes she recognizes him from the missing persons.

Oh, which adds like a very interesting dimension to Sarah's character too, even though she's like still kind of too young to be fully, I guess, engaged in that conversation or that doesn't fully happen within the movie. But I think with that context with that, there is like so much of her own family history being hidden from her, including what happened to her father, which it seems like maybe nobody knows. You can sort of just assume her connecting with Alma and Alma kind of protecting her, even though she is using her as an instrument. I think it is like very intentional that Alma tells, I mean, that that happens at the end, tells Sarah that, To make sure that she's breathing, to have the oxygen, like

steal the oxygen from her grandfather. That Alma is not going to sink to the level of Enrique by killing a child. Although, of course, happy to kill him. Yeah, I was really struck by the scene toward the end where the ghosts or the spirits....

Of the people who died in the genocide are standing on the lawn of the house. And Valeriana, who is a fascinating character because she is indigenous, but she's also a devoted servant of Monteverde. And we can talk more about that, but she is doing that protective ritual. And all the, all the women are there. Carmen, Natalia, Sarah, And she's saying, you know, we're innocent. We shouldn't be punished for what this man did. And everyone is very happy to basically be absolved of their complicity.

But there's so many layers to Valeriana being the character who does that because like she is a part of this family, but also she's, there's that moment where I think it's the first time that Enrique is asking her for protection and And the way that it's phrased is very specific. And all my notes closed when my computer crashed.

But it is something like, if one of you has it written down, it's like, protect us from who seeks to harm us. When she is protecting the person who seeks to harm her.

Yes.

And who seeks to harm people like her. And there's just like, in that line alone, I was so struck by it. Because she is like, circumstantially so... caught between. And, and I wish, I guess I do wish if there was one character who we could really know more about at the expense of kind of any other character in this home, it would be Valeriana because, you know, I mean, she is very smart. She's very observant. She's very shrewd.

You can, I mean, her dealings with Alma, I mean, Alma, who basically everyone else in the household ignores if they don't need something from her, except for Sarah. But that Valeriana figures out sort of who Alma is, conducts her own internal investigation. Like, you have to think she is, she's well aware of the very complicated position she has in this household. And I just wish we got to spend more time with her. I feel like she sort of ends up being more incidental to the other characters in the house.

Yes. Yeah. Especially when she's translating for the other housekeepers and she's like, they're scared, they're upset.

Yeah.

They just want their pain. They want to go home. And she's being put in such a horrible position of translating Carmen's cruel words of like, you're so ungrateful. And, every, every time it comes to like managing the staff, it's like, Oh you, you do it. Cause it's your people.

When, meanwhile, she is literally in the, like, like biologically a part of the evil family. And I don't know. I mean, you, I fully believe that as much as we get to know about Floriana, which unfortunately doesn't include a last name, which I was like, come on guys. But, um, that, she would be aware. She knows Enrique. She knows who he is, what he's like. I just think it would be kind of impossible for that to not cross your mind if you'd been with a family for so long. Yeah, I guess I just wish we had more with her because the moments that she is very active in the plot are so charged and powerful. And while I do appreciate how much the movie gets into watching i guess carmen specifically kind of unravel and have to face the

scale of what she has been complicit to for her entire life in order to ensure her own survival which is being party to the colonizer 101 yeah that's important but i i do yeah i just i just want a more valeriana i guess I wanted.

More of her and more Alma. Because if I had one criticism about this movie, I feel like perhaps it does a little too much to center the powerful white family who either committed or is complicit in the genocide and tend to give them more focus than Alma. And I know that she shows up a little later in the story, but even so, I also wanted... more.

Of her yes and also Maria Mercedes Coroy as an actress is very magnetic oh yeah she has this intense gaze that just draws you in and she's in another really good movie that's also in Cafeteria but she has this like silky long hair that she kind of uses to like as a character almost like the way she like moves it in front of her face and like looks over her shoulder. She's very good at saying a lot without needing to open her mouth. Yes.

So expressive.

She is incredible in this. And again, yeah, like you're saying, Caitlin, with most of her character is having to come through just through her, through her expressions. And even though we do get the, I guess, reveal feels like too cheap of a word, but we get the reveal of what happened to her family and that she is herself a victim of this genocide and her children are a victim of this genocide that I don't know. I, I, it's an interesting thing. Cause I, I, I was thinking about, uh, I only saw the zone of interest once, but, but that both of those movies have an interest in the banality of evil and.

Which is worth interrogating and.

Definitely. Definitely. Um, but I, but I always leave, those movies kind of wanting more insight into the people just outside right and and so while this movie is so effective at just the low hum of dissent right outside the walls the whole time and how performing normalcy which they should not which Enrique should not even be free to enjoy and These attempts at normalcy, but that it's rotting him and it's rotting the family and that even them getting away with this horrific genocide is corrosive to everyone.

It still leaves you, I guess, yeah, it just leaves you wanting to know more about... The people get, and I also think about, these are all such different movies, but Oppenheimer, right? Another movie that really focuses on, wow, he did this really terrible thing. How does he feel about it? And it's like, that is not even in the top 1000 movies. questions that we should be interrogating first. Again, this isn't a criticism of the filmmaker. I just, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. And it's not, it's not one movie's job to do everything either. I think that this, that again, like the way that this movie tackles the banality of evil is very intentional and very effective.

For sure. I, I have a question and I'm curious to hear the two of your thoughts on it. As far as Carmen and, strangling her husband at the end. I wasn't sure if that was implied to be La Llorona almost like possessing her to enact her revenge via Carmen, or if it was Carmen finally coming to terms with the thing that she had been denying or dismissing throughout the rest of the movie, because For so much of it, she's saying, you know, really atrocious racist things about Indigenous people and particularly Indigenous women. She says something like, well, whatever my husband might have done, it's in the past and it should stay in the past. We shouldn't.

And one of the things that really stuck me was with Alma, another sort of clear moment about where this family is at is that after Enrique is seen masturbating in front of Alma, something the whole family seems to know, or maybe Natalia is just learning happens all the time that he assaults and harasses indigenous women always has. And that Natalia goes to apologize to Alma for her father's behavior.

And then Carmen's right behind her saying, basically, it was what you were wearing. Like, don't wear that skimpy little thing that presumably Carmen gave her. Like, it's just.

Yeah, for sure.

It was her work uniform. She assigned it to her.

Yeah. I think.

Her strangling him was a little bit of both.

That's where I landed.

It was both, like, the Llorona, but also... Carmen, you know, is complicit. But also, like, this man put her through total hell for the last few decades. And now she's, like, seeing it all at once. Like, this is the price of what I paid. I think it was a combination of both.

Right, because this was right after... she saw him shoot her granddaughter. This is shortly after he shot at her, at Carmen.

Yeah.

So I landed on like, it's a little bit of both. She's possessed by La Llorona, but also finally reconciling.

And I think that she's been forced to by, I guess, what we could argue is the possession. She's been forced to what she has refused to do, it seems like, their whole marriage, which is actually look at what her husband emboldened in the genocide by being put directly in Alma's shoes. She, she can no longer hide behind walls.

She can no longer, I really appreciated the cinematography of how, even though like I'm of two minds and you're like, you do want to, who, who the protesters are is kind of a reveal and, But that you see them as if you're hiding, like as if you're Carmen and that she's found ways to hide from this for so long and that she's forced to actually experience it. Like, yeah, I like that it's not totally clear because it works both ways.

For sure. Does anyone have anything else they'd like to talk about?

Oh, we've talked about a lot of the stuff I've been excited to talk about. Yeah.

Another line that really stuck with me is at the end of the testimony we see in the trial of the Mayan woman recounting her story and all the brutality she experienced and witnessed. And at the very end of her testimony, she says, I'm not embarrassed to tell you what I went through. I hope you're not embarrassed to do justice. And I was like, oh. Oh my God, that's powerful.

What a line.

Yeah.

It's so good.

We mentioned that the movie passes the Bechdel test.

It does.

All right.

It does. Sorry, I just wanted to... This movie has a co-writer, Lissandra Sanchez.

Yeah, Lissandra Sanchez.

I just wanted to shout out other people because this movie was... filmed in in Guatemala and like you're saying Vanessa like went on to be an Oscar contender did very well and I feel like doesn't get talked enough about so just before we wrap up if you haven't seen it it's so easy to watch uh you know just check it out it's very very very.

Good truly the way that I came across this film was kind of by accident I So it's spooky movie season, of course. I was looking at a list of, I think it was a list of like the highest rated horror movies on Rotten Tomatoes. And I was just going through this list to see what we haven't covered yet on the podcast. And this movie is pretty close to the top because it has like a 95 or 96% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Not that Rotten Tomatoes should be the like end-all be-all of a movie's quality, of course.

But a lot of critics really enjoyed this movie. And so I was scrolling through the list and I came upon it. And when I saw the title of it, I was conflating it with The Curse of La Llorona. And I was like, what do you mean this has like a 95% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes? Wasn't this a famously terrible movie?

If I'm Jairo Bustamante, God, imagine how... pissed you would be if a shitty movie with basically the same title as your movie came out the same year. I'd be like, psyop, psyop.

Right? Yeah.

So I saw this movie. I was like, wait a minute. Oh, this is a different movie. And then I looked into it and then I was like, oh shit, like we need to cover this. So, and now here we are, we did it. And then our nipple scale, where we rate the movie on a scale of zero to five nipples based on examining it through an intersectional feminist lens.

It's going to get a high rating. I'll dock it a little bit for not focusing more on... the characters who are indigenous women, especially Valeriana and Alma. But I think what the movie does accomplish is really effective and really important and, you know, examining the complicity of this family and the kind of mental gymnastics members of this family have to do to live with themselves. This is a small part of it, but like Monteverde's fetishization of the same group of people who he killed in a genocide which just demonstrates that the colonial imperial mindset operates on those in power not viewing the people who they are targeting as people which is how the colonizers are able to both sexually objectify them and murder them so

I thought it was important for this movie to include that Also, when I learned about the details of this genocide in Guatemala, how it was European settlers and capitalist enterprises stealing indigenous land and murdering indigenous people, a large percentage of whom were children, it's impossible not to draw the parallels between that and what Israel is currently doing to Palestinians. And this is exactly what so many genocides throughout history have looked like. So, so yeah, I think this movie is just doing so much. And I love this interpretation of the La Llorona figure and And I'm going to give it four and a half nipples. And I'm going to give them all to Alma.

Amazing. Yeah, I'm going to meet you there. I think that this movie is so singular. It is doing so many things. And this movie both caused me to learn more about the genocide in Guatemala than I had previously known. It also is just an incredibly good, well-realized movie. And so, yes, I agree with you, Caitlin. I think that I would have appreciated knowing more about the characters who are having to endure the violence brought upon them by Enrique's administration.

I also am very team... valeriana i want to know what she's thinking how she's feeling.

More what mental gymnastics is she doing yeah.

Right because every every character in this home is having to do a very specific kind of mental gymnastics and i feel like valeriana is the most interesting character in the house and i wish we we mostly see her reacting we don't get to really get moments with her interior yeah but outside of that i mean i i just think it is like it's unreal it's so good Yeah, I'm going to go for nips and I'm going to give those nips to Maria Mercedes Caray. I'm going to give two to Jairo Bustamante, who I'm very excited to see other movies of his. Vanessa, have you seen other movies of his? This is my first.

I have not. And I know he does other movies about specific things happening in Guatemala. So I really want to watch them. And I know Maria Mercedes Caray is in another movie about Maya women that I've heard really good things about.

Incredible. Yeah, I'm really excited to dig more into his filmography. And then I'll give my last nipple to Maria Telon, who played Valeriana.

Vanessa, how about you?

I'm going to give this movie 4.5 nips. And I give all the nips to the women actors in this movie. Because they play such a kaleidoscope of complicated figures.

Yeah.

From women that are complicit to women that are victimized. All of the women in this movie had to portray such layered, complicated performances. And my favorite moments are when they are together on screen because they bounce off of each other so well.

Ooh, I know. Especially Natalia and Carmen.

Yeah. Natalia and Carmen in that scene were Natalia's like, mom, how can you not believe these things? And she's just like, oh, they're whores. They lie.

They're whores who were paid to lie.

Oh.

Yeah. Carmen is really doing some nasty work in this movie. But also in a way that I think offers, this is always like such a difficult line to toe. I think this movie shows her, at least in my estimation, just enough empathy to understand why she's doing what she's doing without the plot or the story excusing her at all.

But I do think it is important and instructive to understand why people ally to powers in the way that they do.

Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Because the movie basically ends with Her strangling and killing her husband. And then the next shot we see of her is the back of her head at his funeral. We don't get any sort of like, look at this triumphant thing she did to redeem herself.

And we don't even get to see her grief, really. We just are like, that is just the thing that happened in the story.

Right, right.

Well, Vanessa, thank you so much for coming back for a sixth time.

Thank you for having me.

Let's make it a seven.

I love being on the Bechdel cast.

We love having you. Just because we have you here and you're a horror authority, are there any horror releases or horror rewatches that you're particularly excited about this season?

Every year I show my niece a scarier and scarier movie. And this year she watched Hellraiser for herself. And I'm really excited to show her Hellraiser 2 because it's one of the few movies in which an older woman is a seductress.

Ooh, interesting.

And so Hellraiser 2 is one of my favorite rewatches because Julia should have been the villain in one, but they made it her boyfriend, so they made her the villain in two. And she's a woman in her 40s, and she's portrayed as sexy and evil and seductive. And you just never see that. And that's why Hellraiser 2 is like an interesting movie because I don't think we've ever seen a villain like her again.

Hell yeah. I was going to say in their 40s and sexy and evil and seductive me vibes.

Anyway.

But yes, please come back anytime you want to talk about whatever you'd like.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Truly, it's such a wide array of movies we've covered with you at this point. Surprise us.

If you ever want to do The Thing, I would love to do The Thing because there's not a single woman on that set. There's not a single woman in that movie.

But it's a pretty good movie.

It is a woman-free production and it's an incredible movie.

Let's do it.

Hell yeah.

Where can people follow you online, check out any of your work? Plug away.

You can find me on NESS Guerrero or SNES Guerrero all across social media. It's usually one or the other. And I've been posting my reel because I'm looking for work. So if any of you know anybody that's looking for a producer, find me. And yeah, if you ever want me to guest on your pod or something, just shoot me an email. If you're queer, I'll say yes.

Amazing.

Nice.

And you can follow us on Instagram at Bechdelcast. You can subscribe to our Patreon, a.k.a. Matreon, where we do two bonus episodes every single month. Plus you get access to the back catalog of episodes. Around 200 bonus episodes. This month we are covering Back Rooms and Saw 2 on the Matreon.

Lock in.

Get excited.

And with that, we will see you next Thursday.

See you then.

Bye.

Bye. The Bechdelcast is a production of iHeartMedia, hosted and produced by me, Jamie Loftus.

And me, Caitlin Durante. The podcast is also produced by Sophie Lichterman.

And edited by Caitlin Durante. Ever heard of them?

That's me. And our logo and merch and all of our artwork, in fact, are designed by Jamie Loftus.

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La Llorona (2019) with Vanessa Guerrero

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