March 27–April 3, 1997

movies

Selena

How do you please two different audiences at once?

by Cindy Fuchs

Written and directed by Gregory Nava
A Warner Bros. Release

Any movie about Selena Quintanilla Perez is between several rocks and hard places. Selena, written and directed by Gregory Nava and executive produced by her father, Abraham Quintanilla, reveals some signs of strain and occasional cheese. Selena's death in March 1995 made national headlines (and her posthumously released English-language album made much money). The subsequent trial of her murderer, her former fan-club president, made more headlines (as well as Geraldo's nighttime show), which means that a lot of people already know this part of the story.

What the movie is banking on is that not everyone knows the rest of her story as well as her loyal fans do. This makes for some interesting tensions. Like any biopic, it has to remake her life (which, we might presume, was occasionally untidy or boring) into an orderly, spectacular two-hour package. And it has to please her fans while explaining her appeal to a broader, uninitiated Anglo audience. The film takes the celebratory route. It shows her as a talented, ambitious child (played by Becky Lee Meza) who sits on her rooftop in Corpus Christi, TX, looking at the moon, which represents (heavy-handedly) her dreams. When she grows up into Jennifer Lopez, she remains determined to succeed. She wears a series of short-shorts outfits (it's Texas, it's hot) and soon becomes an unprecedented female Tejano superstar, on the edge of crossing over into mainstream popularity.

The opening images show Selena at a fully euphoric moment, playing before her largest audience, at the Houston Astrodome in 1995, just months before the murder. She rides around the arena in a horse-drawn wagon, mounts the stage with her band (including her sister on drums, her brother and husband on guitars), and launches into a lively medley of Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor disco hits. The camera emphasizes the high energy and sanitary sexiness of her performance style, swooping in and back, showing her dance steps, signature bustier and heavily lipsticked lips, cutting repeatedly to the wildly enthusiastic crowd.

Selena punctuates its narrative with many such performances, at small-town Southwestern fairgrounds, in Mexico, and later, in more prestigious venues. In between, it reveals what a really nice person she was, through conversations in which she and others assert that she shares and represents the dreams of her largely working-class audience. Her father, played by Edward James Olmos in his earnest Stand and Deliver mode, says she's a "genuine artist of the people." She's definitely a hard worker: she learns Spanish to sing Tejano songs, designs her own costumes, choreographs her own moves. And she's completely sensible and admirable. Her marriage to Chris Perez (Jon Seda) creates an instant of conflict because Dad disapproves, but this is soon over, and the happy family is back on the road again (with repeated inserts of her siblings playing at their instruments, looking a little too much like the Partridge Family).

When the killer (Lupe Ontiveros, apparently cast in this terrible part because she resembles the real-life Yolanda Salivar) appears, the mood gets vaguely dicey. Yolanda is hired to manage Selena's boutique, but every time she gazes adoringly at the singer, you know where this is headed. In the end there is no shooting scene, only a melodramatic cut from Selena's glamorous Grammy Awards performance — spotlighted in her expensive white gown, arms outstretched — to a rose falling in front of her. As manipulative as this sounds, it's actually one of the film's more restrained moments.