Monstrous desire in Samanta Schweblin’s and Claudia Llosa’s "Distancia de rescate"
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[1] Shenandoah University
Shenandoah University
Estados Unidos
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- Localización: CiberLetras: revista de crítica literaria y de cultura, ISSN-e 1523-1720, Nº. 48, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Perspectives on Spanish, Latin American and Latinx television and cinema)
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s most recent feature is the Netflix-produced Distancia de rescate (2021), an adaptation of Argentine Samanta Schweblin’s eponymous novel. Both the original text and the Englishlanguage translation by Megan McDowell, titled Fever Dream, were widely praised by readers from around the world. Since its publication in 2014, literary critics have written prolifically about the novel, hailing it as a psychological thriller that illustrates the ecological horrors of twenty-first-century climate change and its consequences for daily life. Yet there has been a remarkable lack of scholarly attention to the “mutual fascination” between the fictional Amanda and Carla, two young mothers who meet when Amanda arrives for a family holiday in the Argentine countryside (Schweblin 12). Informed by Barbara Creed’s work on the monstrous-feminine, I argue that Llosa’s distinctive directorial style, in conjunction with cinematography by Spaniard Óscar Faura, makes conspicuous what readers may have overlooked in Schweblin’s novel. In the film, viewers cannot escape Carla’s beauty nor can they deny Amanda’s attraction to her. I invite readers and spectators alike to acknowledge the existence of Amanda’s desire for Carla, and to consider how that desire relates to her own fate as well as that of her young daughter
