La leyenda del beso

When La Manuela steps forward and declares, “yo soy el plato fuerte,” in plain language of celebration and consumption, she announces herself as the main event—the object of attention, desire, and anticipation. The spotlight follows.

This moment inaugurates the film’s climax. Seated at the center of the room, Pancho becomes the spectator, while La Manuela takes control of the scene as dancer and storyteller. Her body moves as narrative; her dance unfolds as speech. Desire is no longer dispersed among drunken bodies but focused, condensed, and dangerously legible. The queer body here is not marginal—it is spectacularized, staged, and commanding. Within the logic of the fiesta, La Manuela momentarily inverts the sex/gender system: transfeminine presence becomes central rather than peripheral, desired rather than disavowed.

Yet this power is inseparable from risk. The cine de ficheras framework allows her visibility only as spectacle—consumable, eroticized, and temporally bound to the party itself. Her authority derives from her ability to enchant, to hold the gaze, to suspend the room through performance. She knows this. “Yo soy el plato fuerte” is not naïveté; it is strategic self-awareness. She understands that desire is the only language available to her—and that speaking it openly accelerates the scene toward collapse.

This sequence condenses the film’s central paradox. La Manuela’s mastery of the moment—her control over rhythm, attention, and affect—exposes the fragility of the masculine order watching her. Pancho’s desire, once visible, becomes intolerable. What appears here as triumph (she as a she) is also countdown. The spectacle that grants La Manuela centrality simultaneously renders her uncontainable. By forcing recognition, she destabilizes the fragile pact that allows queer desire to circulate only in shadow.

The line thus opens the climax not because it announces pleasure, but because it makes desire undeniable. In claiming the center, La Manuela claims visibility—and in doing so, she triggers the violence that will follow. The party reaches its peak precisely at the moment it can no longer hold.

For most of the film, La Manuela survives by hiding from Pancho. Her withdrawal—from public space, from the brothel, from visibility itself—is a strategy shaped by memory of past violence and by the knowledge that Pancho’s masculinity authorizes harm. When he finally forces his way into the brothel, Manuela retreats even further, slipping into the back patio and watching from the shadows as Pancho drinks, dances, and asserts control over the space. Fear here is spatialized: survival depends on remaining unseen.

That containment collapses the moment Pancho turns his aggression toward La Japonesita. Seeing her daughter grabbed and sexually threatened, Manuela abandons concealment and steps into view. Her emergence is not a return to safety but an act of interruption—one compelled by care, kinship, and the impossibility of continued invisibility.

Pancho’s response is immediate and cruel: “Ámonos, aquí se curó la enferma.” (“Well then—looks like the sick one’s all better now.”) It’s also worth noted that this is said with exited, celebrating. This moment marks the beginning of the film’s climax, where fear gives way to forced visibility and where Manuela’s body is no longer allowed the protection of shadow. What follows—la leyenda del beso—will make desire fully visible, and therefore, trasphobic, lethal.

This is the moment when La Manuela, fully in character as “una mujer muy divina”—playful, theatrical, slightly cegatona—directs Pancho, cast as “el hombre más vigoroso del mundo,” to enter the fiction she is staging. As she dances and narrates, she instructs him to ask her to “bésame las rodillas.” Pancho complies, repeating the line aloud "Kiss my knees, to be able to walk again". Crucially, the request is framed as part of the story, not as Pancho’s own desire. Performance becomes cover.

This sequence marks the moment when Pancho’s masculinity enters open crisis. On screen, the viewer first witnesses gestures that remain socially permissible within the brothel’s economy: Pancho kisses, touches, and grabs La Manuela. These acts do not immediately provoke sanction because they can still be absorbed into a heteromasculine logic that frames Manuela as spectacle, performance, and exception. Within the codes of the fiesta and the brothel, desire can circulate so long as it remains unserious, aestheticized, and deniable. Pancho’s actions are legible as excess, drunkenness, or domination—forms of contact that do not yet threaten his status as “hombre.”

The scene hinges on this displacement. By embedding the gesture within fiction, La Manuela creates a space where Pancho can act without being fully accountable to himself as Pancho. He is not transgressing; he is playing. This allows him to perform intimacy—kneeling, pleading, using the diminutive “Manuelita”—that would otherwise threaten his masculine self-image. Gender roles are temporarily stabilized through fantasy: she is the woman, he is the man, and desire circulates safely so long as it is narrated, choreographed, and aestheticized.

This moment exemplifies La Manuela’s control of the scene. She directs Pancho’s body, speech, and position in space; she commands the narrative and the tempo of desire. The queer body here is not passive spectacle but active dramaturg. Yet this authority is precarious. The same fiction that enables intimacy also delays its consequences. The request—“bésame la rodilla”—marks the point where desire becomes legible through action, setting in motion the sequence that will culminate in the kiss and, shortly after, the collapse of the performance’s protective frame.

The rupture occurs almost immediately. Octavio, Pancho’s cuñado, emerges from the back room where he had been intimidating one of the sex workers and sees Pancho kissing La Manuela. With that look, desire shifts registers: what had been tolerated as spectacle becomes dangerous as evidence. Masculinity here is not undone by desire itself, but by its public legibility. Pancho’s panic is immediate. His affect hardens into rage, and he moves quickly to reassert control through threat and violence: “Te mato si le dices a alguien que me viste chillando.” The scene exposes masculinity as a performance sustained through surveillance and disavowal. Pancho’s crisis is not internal alone—it is produced at the instant his desire is witnessed by another man who stands in for patriarchal order, family, and heterosexual regulation.

From this point forward, the film accelerates toward its end. What Pancho can no longer contain symbolically, he will attempt to erase materially. After the kiss—when desire becomes undeniable and can no longer be folded back into play—Pancho and Octavio pursue La Manuela through the town in the middle of the night. Darkness overtakes the screen as the chase unfolds through empty streets and open land, stripping away the protective frame of the fiesta. The killing does not resolve Pancho’s crisis; it seals it. La Manuela is eliminated not because she deceived him, but because she revealed him. Her death functions as an act of heteromasculine repair, reasserting a social order destabilized by visible queer desire. The film closes by exposing the cost of that repair: transfeminine life is rendered narratively disposable so that masculinity can appear whole again.