The true story of the 17th-century liberal-minded and materialistic (finest library in all Mexico) nun, poet, and playwright, Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, becomes a moving tribute to the creative impulse and a first-rate movie all around: feminist, humanist; ascetic, aesthetic; inspirational in a nonsectarian, secular way; the furthest thing from glib and complacent in its siding with the individual and even the state against God and the church; loftily dignified; legitimately tragic. Sister Juana is persuasively put up as no sort of Catholic saint or martyr, but a catholic sort of one: "More poet than nun," as one opinion has it, "more nun than woman." The movie stands well apart from the others of Argentine director Maria Luisa Bemberg. Thematic similarities aside, it looks nothing at all like Camila or Miss Mary or I Don't Want to Talk about It: no milkiness, no softness, no slackness, nothing but limpid, solid, weighty, stately images in a shallow theatrical space and in sensuously sculptural lighting. Maybe Bemberg was uplifted, so to speak, if not by the example of her protagonist, then by the Octavio Paz critical biography, Sister Juana, or the Traps of Faith, that served as her source material. With Assumpta Serna, Dominique Sanda. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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