Rosenda

Recreating a provincial Michoacán village on a huge studio set, Bracho fused populist romance and melodrama with formal experimentation in this tale of an unusual love triangle in the midst of revolution. Abandoned by her roughhewn fiancé, a peasant woman (Rita Macedo) finds comfort with a local store owner (Fernando Soler), but soon her former lover returns, now as the head of a bandit army. In star power alone Rosenda equals any Hollywood romance—Soler and Macedo were two of Mexican cinema’s biggest idols—yet it is Bracho’s embrace of the power of melodrama, in all its artifice and flourishes, that sets the film apart.