Poder y verdad en El secreto de Romelia

Abstract

The film El secreto de Romelia (Mexico, Busi Cortés, 1988) is a spectacular case in point where the adaptation corrects the misled ending of the original literary text («Widower Román» by Rosario Castellanos), and at once it expands the story (which ends in 1948, year of the national oil expropiation) up to the present of filming (1988, elections year). This way, the film shows three generations of women, whose relations are an allegory of the recent transformation of the political system. This allegorical re-reading is triple: from cinema to the literary text; from intimate drama to political history, and from the immediate present to collective past. In this paper I point out how these levels of meaning are linked starting with the revelation of the generative secret, that is, the secret whose knowledge guarantees keeping (or loosing) the control of others (be it women, as in the original short story; or all of civil society, as in the film). The film exemplifies the transformation of the narrative ternary structure.