Cinema
The Smoking Fish
El pez que fuma
Román Chalbaud · 1977
Synopsis
In a brothel that gives the film its name, La Garza rules over her girls and her business, but lets her lovers believe they run the house by entrusting them with its administration. A penniless young man, just out of prison, gets himself hired there as a handyman, wins the trust of the staff and soon takes the place of the administrator, who was also the madam's lover. Other suitors come in their turn, and power passes from hand to hand: each has his hour before being cast aside.
Context
The film adapts a play by its author, premiered in 1968 by El Nuevo Grupo and drawn from the accounts of young women in a brothel he frequented in his television days; he wrote the screenplay with another playwright, each writing scenes in turn. Filming took place by day in a real brothel in La Guaira, destroyed in the Vargas tragedy of 1999, and a French sound engineer was hired. The third production of the company Gente de Cine, after La quema de Judas and Sagrado y obsceno, the film follows the form of melodrama and leaves poverty and crime as a backdrop. Miguel Ángel Landa, Orlando Urdaneta, Hilda Vera, Haydée Balza and Claudio Brook are the performers.
Who it is for
One hundred and fifteen minutes in Spanish, with no translation; an avowed melodrama, with its rivalries, its entrances and its reversals.
Prizes and reception
The first film submitted by Venezuela for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, it won an award at Cartagena and is regarded as one of the best in the country.