Welcome back to Registering the Registry, where we consider and review the films inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry by merit of their cultural, historical, and aesthetic qualities! This time round, we’re back in the world of Chicano filmmaking over twenty years after Zoot Suit, to check out Josefina López and Patricia Cardoso’s 2002 adaptation of Real Women Have Curves, a Chicana coming of age story about self-image and independence! Have a look in, why don’t you?
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It’s interesting how the march of time and compromises necessary in adaptation can result in traces of original inspiration being exorcised from the film version of an older work. Take the source material for today’s film, Real Women Have Curves, the 1990 play by Josefina López. Set in an East LA sweatshop owned by the daughter of recently naturalized migrants and largely operated by the same, the play’s concerns of body positivity and intergenerational conflict are directly touched by the then-recent 1987 Simpson-Rodino Amnesty Act, which legalized many undocumented persons in the process of tightening restrictions on hiring illegal immigrants. López herself was the daughter of such illegal workers, spent much of her young life going about day to day life while on constant lookout for border patrol agents, and has recounted how her own experiences working in a grayly legal sweatshop prior to college served as her primary muse for the setting and characters seen in her play. Three of the five principle characters were undocumented until months prior to its events, the remaining two are the daughters of one of these women, the matter of how Chicana women can feel safe simply existing in a public space, much less rise above societal standards for femininity and idealized bodies common to any woman, is bound to form the heart of any production of Real Women Had Curves. Had the feature film adaptation arrived sooner, it too might’ve touched on this matter.
By the early 2000s, however, even as immigration and border control remained hot-button issues in the United States, the specific experiences of those naturalized under the Amnesty Act had already become a distant memory, and the process of pitching the play to film studios was already faced with the brick wall of executives not wanting to back plays dealing with Chicana issues for fear of not finding an audience. One would already expect López’s collaboration with screenwriter/producer George LaVoo to shift the story’s focus away from immigrant experiences as per their goal — of the five women in the factory, it is youngest daughter Ana García (America Ferrera in her major debut) who gets elevated to main character status, her life and relationships outside work given central focus as her mother Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros — also seen as the mother character in Zoot Suit) becomes an antagonistic figure, her sister Estela (Ingrid Oliu) a supporting character, and fellow workers Pancha (Soledad St. Hilaire) and Rosali (Lourdes Pérez) part of a larger ensemble of workers who only come to full prominence in their final scene. As Ana’s woes are specifically oriented towards body image and generation gap issues within the script, however, these and the easier time communicating them to the necessary young audience in a modern setting as opposed to period take precedence, and the film also loses the play’s specific September 1987 setting, updating to modern day and leaving the experience of recent naturalization entirely behind. In the film as directed under Patricia Cardoso, only a few mentions of Ana’s parents having upped roots at some point in the past remains of the events which put López’s pen to paper in the first place.
This is not to argue Real Women Have Curves has become lesser for abandoning its starting impulse from twelve years prior. If one were to watch the film blind, as I did for a university class a few years back, one would never guess the double-coded life necessary for undocumented persons had anything to do with Ana’s story, one of a girl who rises daily to deal with a domineering mother who fakes pains just to exert a little influence to kickstart the morn. Hers here are two far more universally identified, that of a young woman seeking higher education and balked by parents who fear her loss to distance and new experience, and of course a young woman whose mother endlessly belittles her over her weight despite not looking much different after years of childrearing. Ferrera plays Ana as the quintessential basically a good kid type, studious and self-motivated and all the good things a child on the cusp of adulthood should be, if a touch ungrateful to those around her and unappreciative of the forces controlling her life. All almost for naught when her mother forces her financially-strapped sister into hiring Ana at their dress factory, exercising a last measure of control to squash what we see as Ana’s good traits in order to forcibly foster what’s lacking into what Carmen believes idealized obedience. Naturally a girl on the cusp of spreading her wings finding them clipped, critiqued as too flabby, and tied to an ironing machine on a pittance of a salary is liable to lash out, be driven to distraction by the sight and sound of her mother lording her comfort in this dead-end place over her head, and it is only through a bit of overly-emotional haranguing Carmen is able to convince Ana to stay after all this proves too much within minutes. Feels like plenty running through the film all on its lonesome, enough to keep one invested in where this narrative will go and how the conflict between mother and daughter will resolve.
Just because the focus has narrowed and specified on Ana doesn’t mean matters concerning the factory’s operation or the other women within have become any less important, though. Quite to the contrary, a good deal of the second act turns on the strain Estela feels when she takes on a too-large job to prove her competence and cover for flagging income of late, only to lose an entire family of workers when they return to Mexico on their working mother’s wishes. The stress of the deadline hangs heavy in the air as Carmen’s predilection for talking gossip instead of focusing on her task couples with Ana’s dissatisfaction over her lot, leading to one or two small breakdowns on Estela’s part. We find a minor highlight in the sequence when Ana accompanies Estela to a meeting with their commissioner at a large local company, the presence of someone wholly unsympathetic to the worries and pressures we’ve seen at the factory almost forging a united front between the two sisters, right until Ana can’t hold back one last piffy little comment, which almost costs Estela everything and nearly fractures the relationship between the sisters. It’s not all for naught, as it does quite a bit to deepen Ana’s appreciation for how hard her family works for what they have (and inspires her to go to their father in secret for a little emergency financial aid when her sister and mother’s pride is too strong for the business’ good), but in the moment it feels far more like proof Ana’s continued stay with her family and in the factory will put her future at risk if she can’t get out soon. You’re covering the mature economic concerns of managing a large group of people with intersections amongst your family and the youthful drawbacks and benefits to impulsiveness and steady planning alike, all nicely balanced.
The addition of material wholly unconnected to the sweatshop helps advance our understanding of Ana as someone who’d rather define herself by what she knows and values outside the home as well. It’s not terribly much as far as these expansions go, a few scenes in conversation with her teacher Mr. Guzman (George Lopez) and a handful of encounters with her boyfriend Jimmy (Brian Sites), but a little does go a long way. Given how often we see Ferrera marking Ana as someone who’s constantly frustrated, denied her own voice and forced into activities she finds undesirable or uncomfortable, it’s good to find her in locations where she can feel comfortable in her own skin, even as she’s uncertain how to handle Mr. Guzman’s request she write a personal statement for her university application, or caught between charmed and disquieted Jimmy can’t stop staring at her breasts. There’s worlds of difference between unwanted or uncertain stimuli when you engage with a situation at your own level, and the same when you’re there out of obligation or at another’s whim. Seeing such lets us know Ana does have the capacity to navigate these challenges without shutting down or overbalancing her response, if only she can find reason to make herself comfortable and define her times at home and work by something less about Carmen’s domineering personality, and more about Ana’s ability to feel she’s in HER place.
Two concurrent early third act sequences are illustrative here, one intersecting Ana’s home life, the other wholly separate, both serving to mature her substantially after a preceding hour of lingering in a miasma of discomfort with only occasional escape or betterment. Firstly, when she learns of her acceptance to Colombia University through Mr. Guzman visiting her house, only for her mother and father to stand up and firmly stamp out any chance she has of taking this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, citing fears Ana’s leaving will somehow tear the family apart. Given the way she slumps down into her chair in the foreground while the background shows the family half-heartedly returned to their mingling at a greater distance than before, it’s difficult to believe the effort actually resulted in their goal. Subsequently, we’ve a far happier moment for Ana, when she sneaks out of the house to visit her boyfriend and have sex for the first time, refusing to let him turn out the light and insisting he look at her naked as she really is, denying any separation between the facts that she’s fat and beautiful. Of course, she can’t part on the morning without a self-deprecating comment about how he’ll probably meet some skinny girl at college and forget all about her, which stings for both, but one cannot expect progress to come all at once. One shows Ana has come to a limit on what she can gain by staying with her family at this stage in her life, the other shows she’s capable of accepting herself and defining what makes her happy in her own skin and space alike. All we need is a moment to synthesize the two revelations into profound, transformative action.
Thus it is, after a brief diversion to defy her mother by challenging her fake pregnancy and eating a piece of flan (as highlighted in all the marketing material), we come to the film’s rightly most famous scene, and the one in which it best exemplifies its title. Despite the other factory women from the play not receiving much beyond the occasional bantering contribution to scene-guiding chatter here and there for much of the film, St. Hilarie and Pérez prove they deserved more as Pancha and Rosali as Ana, tired and overheated from working the steam iron in the sweltering summer afternoon, strips of her shirt and pants and again defies her mother by asserting she has every right to show her body and be proud of it in private. What follows is Ana, Estela, Pancha, and Rosali gradually shedding their clothes, comparing cellulite and stretchmarks, forging a bond based on mutual comfort the likes of which Ana initially thought impossible, shirking this one little taboo and in doing finding a lot of love and respect for one another. It’s definitely blunt as hell like a lot of Real Women Have Curves, but not without good cause — for Ana, this is her biggest step towards independence, the moment when she fully crystalizes her respect for those she looked down upon and treats the supposedly shameful body she’s hated the entire time as worthwhile no matter the context. Damned right she’s gonna talk about it in no uncertain terms, make sure all who hear know she’s fat and beautiful without contradiction, and not about to take anyone’s guff over it anymore.
Unhappily, though, it is not the hardest step in her journey towards self-actualization. That title goes to the final step, when she’s squared away matters with her cowokers, her family, and the university, and readied herself for the first trip away from home to attend Colombia. We come back round to where we started, with Carmen feigning sickness in bed and Ana trying to reach her, a door between them this time. For all Ana desperately wants Carmen to rise and give her blessing, however begrudgingly, her mother’s fear of losing her daughter keeps the lock firmly in place, and Ana has to go out into the world learning a hard but necessary lesson at the last moment: just because you understand somebody, call them kin or friend, you cannot always reconcile all your differences, and sometimes have to cut immediate ties with the understanding it should not mean a total severance forever. While it is sad Carmen ends the film by throwing a wall of fear and bitterness between herself and her daughter rather than reconciling their differences as in the play, it does rather have to be this way, doesn’t it? As an audience, we can project our own experiences onto Ana, hope she can find peace and harmony and fresh bonds with her mother at some point in the future, or pray she gets out and never looks back, or imagine any number of alternate futures past the point when credits roll, but we have to walk out the door with her issue unresolved for everything she’s learnt and built over the preceding 80 minutes to matter. One is not a truly confident independent if one cannot make the tough choices sometimes.
One makes sacrifices to move forward in life, just as one does in filmmaking. The idealized form, fully married to our roots and wearing all we know and have known proudly on our sleeves is not always within reach, and we have to accept the imperfect best we can manage if the best we have to give is to reach the world at large. Real Women Have Curves is perhaps blunt and emotionally simple in the name of making Ana’s story readily resonate with the right audience on release in 2002, and looking back on the film in 2021, with all the years and years of complications surrounding illegal immigration and undocumented person in the nearly two decades since, I wonder whether the naturalization elements and the lifelong fears inherent to those experiences would be so readily dropped if the film were to arrive today. What is lost from the stage production is adequately compensated for by strong performances across the board, a mature outlook on the standard coming of age story, and a memorably kind-hearted perspective on a community so often portrayed by outsiders as little more than a den for gang activity and tragedy. López, LaVoo, and Cardoso’s work rings true this relatively short time later, and personally I hope it has the chance to continue ringing in the decades to come, just as so many other entrants into the Registry do.
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Hoy. Who else worked through a COVID diagnosis the last week? T’wasn’t fun, let me tell you, but the work is finished, and we are staring down the last film from 2019’s National Film Registry class next week! From 2003, acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris sits down to interrogate former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, and the lessons from a century of warfare in The Fog of War. Amazon, Fandango, Vudu, YouTube, all the usual digital rental/purchase venues have it for sale. See you all then!
Gargus also writes plenty more reviews over on Letterboxd, and rambles about this and that from time to time over on twitter.