Fuego is a movie from Argentina but we were so taken with this Japanese poster that we decided on it over the original promo art. The colors laid atop the black and white background are nice. As for the movie, which originally premiered in 1969 and reached Japan today in 1971, it’s a bizarre sexploitation flick about Isabel Sarli and her servant Alba Mujica, who carry on a lustful lesbian affair while Sarli is simultaneously pursued by local alpha male Armando Bo. The triangle is complicated by the fact that Sarli has a little problem: she wants sex so much she doesn’t care where, when, or from whom she gets it. The movie’s theme song tells the story:
Fuego en tu boca,
Fuego en tu cuerpo,
Fuego en tu sangre,
En tus entrañas,
Que queman mi alma,
Mi amor.
Fire in your mouth,
Fire in your body,
Fire in your blood,
In your guts (eww), or alternatively, bowels (eew)
That burns my soul,
My love.
It’s a good thing Sarli has fire in her blood, because she makes love in the snow. No blanket under her or anything. She’s so overheated she goes around her provincial Patagonian town randomly flashing men. She’s so inflamed she even squirms and moans when she sleeps. “I don’t know if I’m fickle or wicked,” she muses. Her problem is neither. It’s really that she’s hostage to a cheeseball sexploitation script. She tells her suitor Bo she’ll be unfaithful if they marry, but he doesn’t care. “I want to be good,” Sarli says. Mission unaccomplished. As her doctor explains, her condition is caused by sexual neurosis. “A neurosis that is particularly manifested in the genitals.”
Okay then. It’s unsurprising that the quack doctor next takes a comprehensive feel around Sarli’s vagina. But no cure is to be found, there or anywhere, and her condition continues to consume her. Bo (who wrote and directed, as well as did most of the boob kissing) presents her narratively as an almost cursed figure, a kind of tragic sex goddess of the Andes. But even so, the movie is no more than a bad South American soap opera. Or really, even a classical opera—it needs only an aria to complete its ascent up majestic Mount Melodrama. Sarli is a legendary sex symbol in South America and she shows why, over and over, but in the final analysis we can’t recommend Fuego. However, we doubt we’ll ever forget it.
