Real People Really Have Their own Identities! Real Women Have Curves Film Critique

Real People Really Have Their own Identities!

Real Women Have Curves Film Critique

Drew Durham

The film Real Women Have Curves is a 2002 directed by Patricia Cardoso is a film adaptation of a stage play by Josefina Lopez.  The movie is focused on its protagonist a first generation (her parents were immigrants) Mexican American teenager named Ana Garcia (played brilliantly by America Ferrera). Ana Garcia is an overweight Latina rebel with a cause. She is out to prove herself, define herself by her own choices, and most of all to be the first in her family go to college. Her mother Carmen (played by Lupe Ontiveros) is strictly conservative in her ideals, her teachings and her perspective. Carmen constantly insults her daughter Ana about being overweight, and is strongly against Ana going to college, saying Ana must work and settle down, get married and have kids already, since Carmen’s other daughter Estella (Ana’s sister) owns the dress factor and seems uninterested in more than just her business, as it is struggling. Carmen works in her sister’s sweat factory making a sub minimum wage while working on fancy department store dresses. After asking her father for a loan to save the factory, Ana says that she never knew Estella worked so hard.

After discussing her future with her father and after much encouragement form her high school English teacher, Ana receives a grant to Columbia University in New York. Her mother Carmen refuses to give her blessing, but her father supports her no matter what. This final statement, Ana leaving her families home and starting her own new future, is a clear declaration of independence and a strong refusal of her mother’s conservative model of women as submissive and with less worth than men.  Estella, the dress factory owner, and Ana’s sister agrees with Ana’s decision.

The communication groups within the film are all Hispanic or Latino/a, but the purpose of the film is to have the audience relate to the characters and learn or be reminded of the value of individuality in any culture and how this individuality can cause rifts in any family and across all culture/identity lines. I liked the message of brave self-expression and self-definition and how these two together show the beauty of each and every person. I think the cultural communication was plain to see in Carmen’s strict limits and rules and Ana’s acceptance of all nuances, and differences. It seems to me that education changes a person a lot, I think especially in certain cultures it can be more difficult to hold strong on to traditional values if members of that identity group become more and more educated, this movie is a great example of that for first generation Mexican Americans. The culture difference in this movie is a generation gap, a paradigm shift.

The communication groups in the film are mostly generational groups and the people in groups who have been given authority. There is a brief interaction between Estela, Ana and a Hispanic executive Mrs. Glass who sternly refuses to give the loan so that the factory can have the time and power to fill the dress orders for the department store (thankfully Ana’s father loans the money just in time!).

The intercultural dynamic was mainly between Ana’s immigrant parents Carmen and Ana’s father and their first generation Mexican American child Ana. There was plenty of conflict and none of it was really ever resolved. Sometimes that how life is, not every story has a happy resolution for all relationships, in any given family this can be true. As for managing and resolving intercultural differences, I noticed mainly how it was left unresolved, how there was still this gap seemingly unbridgeable between Carmen and Ana at the end of the film. Neither Ana nor Carmen showed to be giving any ground or looking for any commonalities at all in their communications with each other. The feel good part of the movie was Ana’s father and her sister Estella who both realized Ana’s individuality to be just as important as her ancestry, or ethnicity.    

I learned or was reminded that someone’s culture can be comforting, but it can also be insulating, and used a protection from the rest of the world. We can live in ancestral predefined cultural or traditional bubbles or we can, each one of us, define the way we want to be identified as individual human beings. But this might mean assimilating or integrating and thus identifying with more ambiguous identity labels such as Mexican American as opposed to Mexican. Perhaps it is because of the narrowly restrictive limit of options for Ana’s future that she decides to leave the traditional role of a Mexican Woman for chance at a better life.

I like the distinction Arasartnam writes about in his 2011 text between assimilation and integration. The difference, he writes is in attitude toward the culture of origin. If the individual in question has a negative attitude toward the culture of origin and a positive of the host culture then that is assimilation. Whereas if the attitudes toward culture of origin and the host culture are both positive then that is integration. (Arasarnam, 2011, p. 70) In my eyes Ana is assimilating as she has a negative opinion of her mother’s values.

I really like the way that Ana is unafraid, perhaps brash, and rude at times, but honest with herself and staying true to what she wants. We can all learn that all people can really make their own identities, and are free to express who they, who we really are.     

References

Arasaratnnam, L. A. (2011). Perception and communication in intercultural spaces. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America.

IMDB. (2012, 08). Synopsis for real women have curves (2002). Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0296166/synopsis

LaVoo, G., Brown, E. T., López, J., Cardoso, P., Ferrera, A., Ontiveros, L., Oliu, I., ... HBO Video (Firm). (2003). Real women have curves. United States: HBO Video.