The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Friday, October 13, 2006

Geek Pin-Up #12: Soledad Miranda

A beautiful woman stares enigmatically off screen. She has long, jet-black, dead-straight hair, insolent yet sensual lips and eyes that express both heavy-lidded sensuality and existential despair at the same time. Then she writhes about on top of a bed post for a couple of minutes and lezzes up with a blond girl. Vampyros Lesbos (translate it yourself) is the Euro-Horror-Arthouse-Smut Classic from 1971 that made Soledad Miranda an icon and would have made her a star if she hadn't died in a mysterious car-crash before it was released. This film alone makes her our Geek Pin-Up of the Week #12.

Soledad mostly worked with director Jess Franco. As Dario Argento is to Hershall Gordon Lewis, Jess Franco is to Russ Meyer. He dealt in smut and cheapo exploitation films but gave his films a slow, dream-like pace and a sense of melancholy that gave the impression of them being very personal works. It's difficult to say if the minute-long drifting shots of young naked women writhing about on beds expressed Franco's inner demons or just his decision not to waste time cutting up footage that was already perfect (had naked women in it).

What is certain is that Soledad Miranda was central to the effectiveness of his films. She didn't say much, and mostly just wandered about looking sad or writhed about naked looking sad and horny, but she remains one of the most complex cinematic sex icons we have. There is something in her look and body language that gives the impression both of a confused, terrified girl, innocent and alone, staring out of a newly sexualised woman's body and not understanding how the world could have changed all of a sudden, and of an almost elemental power - like the combined sexual experience of a thousand years expressed within one perfect female form - old, wise, and with a look of apathetic contempt when faced with your meagre conquests.

A little bit goth, a little bit hippy, a little bit classy and a little bit utterly debased, Soledad Miranda, because her image is so complex, is actually just as popular a sex symbol with women as with men. She is, importantly, not just a docile sex toy or an unrealistic projected fantasy, she is dealing with her own problems concerning how to incorporate her sexuality with the rest of her life. She also writhes around naked a lot, and you can't argue with that.

I don't know if you were happy in life, Soledad, and I don't know the specifics surrounding your mysterious car-crash, but you were way hot and people are still copying your look. Avril Levigne, for example, and also Macarena Gomez in Stuart Gordon's Dagon.

So rock on, Soledad, and I hope you writhe naked on a bed in heaven.