In México City, a Cuban dancer from "Cabaret Changó" rescues a baby from a garbage can and decides to raise him, but her pachuco pimp gets in her way.
EN
“Directed by the legendary Emilio Fernández and starring Cuban dancer-actor sensation Ninón Sevilla, Victims of Sin (1951) is a hallmark of the golden age of Mexican cinema and one of the very best examples of the cabaretera film, an offshoot of the popular “prostitute melodrama” genre set in cabarets and involving elaborate music and dance sequences. These films often spotlight the Afro-Cuban dance called the rumba, and a rumbera, a female protagonist and figure of escapist fantasy who exhibits her liberation through her sexuality and uninhibited dancing. But unlike other cabareteras from this period, Victims of Sin provides a twist: the film does not punish the rumbera. This unconventional narrative, on top of its extraordinary star power and musical and dance performances, has put Victims of Sin in a class of its own.”
Jacqueline Avila1
“Sevilla, who erupted into stardom with the outlandish Aventurera (1950) and its 1951 follow-up, Sensualidad, is the fichera to end all ficheras. The so-called Golden Venus of the Golden Age, Sevilla spurned Hollywood while inspiring the young cineastes of faraway Paris. “From her inflamed look to her fiery mouth, everything is heightened in Ninón (her forehead, her lashes, her nose, her upper lip, her throat, her voice),” a besotted François Truffaut wrote in Cahiers du Cinéma under the pseudonym Robert Lachenay.
Scarcely the depraved hussy of Sensualidad (a rumbera version of The Blue Angel), Sevilla appears in Víctimas as a typically self-sacrificing super-maternal Fernández heroine (albeit feistier than most and strikingly progressive in her class and gender solidarity) and a most untypical madonna. The featured dancer at Club Changoo, she flings away her career, even turning to prostitution, to support the infant that a dissolute colleague has furtively abandoned, quite literally, in the trash.”
J. Hoberman2
- 1Jacqueline Avila, “Victims of Sin: Dancing in the Dark,” Criterion.com, 19 June 2024.
- 2J. Hoberman, “NIGHT MOVES. The sordid grandeur of Emilio Fernández’s Victims of Sin,” Artforum, 5 October 2023.
FR
« II faut désormais compter avec Ninon Sevilla pour peu que l’on s’occupe des gestes féminins à l’écran, et ailleurs. Regard enflammé, bouche d’incendie, tout se hausse chez Ninon (le front, les cils, le nez, la lèvre supérieure, la gorge, le ton quand elle se fâche), les perspectives fuient par la verticale comme autant de flèches décochées, défis obliques à la morale bourgeoise, chrétienne, et les autres. »
Robert Lachenay [François Truffaut]1
- 1Robert Lachenay, « Notes sur d'autres films, » Cahiers du Cinema, n°32, février 1954.
