Elisa & Marcela (2019)
Elisa y Marcela
Film details
Drama · Romance · Isabel Coixet · 2h 9min
Synopsis
The film tells the true story of Elisa Sánchez Loriga and Marcela Gracia Ibeas, two women in 1901 Spain who fell deeply in love. To overcome societal and legal barriers to their relationship, Elisa assumes a male identity, enabling the pair to marry in secret. Their daring act makes them the first recorded same-sex couple to marry in Spain, but their love is tested as they face relentless persecution and sacrifice.
Verdict
Celebrates and normalizes same-sex marriage.
In-depth analysis
The film deliberately constructs a narrative designed to generate emotional sympathy towards a relationship between two women who, faced with the legal impossibility of marrying in 1885, resort to the subterfuge of one posing as a man. The narrative structure systematically presents the relationship as true and pure love, and the social environment that rejects it as ignorant and oppressive. There is no ambiguity: the work asks the viewer to celebrate same-sex marriage and to view as heroic the deception necessary to achieve it. The problem is not showing the real historical drama of these two women, but rather that the film eliminates any perspective that points out that marriage has a specific nature — the complementary union of man and woman ordered towards life. The staging (black and white, careful cinematography) grants aesthetic dignity to the project, but it does not change what it proposes: the redefinition of marriage presented as the triumph of love over injustice. For parents: this is exactly the kind of work that uses legitimate empathy towards suffering individuals to establish as normal something that is not. Not recommended.