Fuego (1969 film)

• Isabel Sarli as Laura • Armando Bó as Carlos • Alba Mujica as Andrea • Roberto Airaldi as Dr. Salazar • Hugo Mujica as Jorge • Oscar Valicelli as Mechanic • Miguel A. Olmos as Driver ==Production==

The film was shot between 1968 and 1969 in the Patagonian town of San Martín de los Andes and New York City. Starting in 1968, the Sarli-Bo films began to focus more on sex. Columbia regularly called Bo to ask how many sex scenes were in the movie. ==Release==

The film became the first Argentine film banned following new censorship rules under military dictator Juan Carlos Onganía. Advised by Jaime Cabouli, a well-known distributor, Bó and Sarli went to New York City with the film's negative where it was released, following a $150,000 publicity campaign, at the Rialto West and Rialto East on October 10, 1969. ==Critical reception==

American film critic Roger Greenspun gave the film a positive review, writing in The New York Times that "Isabel Sarli squeezes more sexual frisson into the space between breathing in and breathing out than most of us could spread over a lifetime of ordinary love-making." ==Legacy==

Fuego has been considered "a milestone in the history of Argentine cinema" and one of Sarli's "erotic peaks". The relationship between Isabel Sarli and Alba Mujica's characters is one of the first representations of lesbianism in Argentine cinema. Lucía Brackes of Los Andes reflected in 2012 that "Coca is such a whore that she becomes a lesbian, a revolutionary and almost militant idea about the oppressed condition of women." John Waters has declared himself a big fan of Sarli's films, citing Fuego as his favorite. He and Divine were admirers of Sarli and watched her movies in New York City's grindhouses. The director and Sarli finally met in 2018 on the occasion of the BAFICI film festival in Buenos Aires, where he gave her an award for her career and interviewed her on video. In 2010, the Film Society of Lincoln Center paid tribute to Sarli with a retrospective titled "Fuego: The Films of Isabel 'Coca' Sarli", screening five of her films in addition to Diego Curubeto's Carne Sobre Carne: Intimidades de Isabel Sarli, a documentary focusing on her career. Richard Corliss of Time wrote: "Seeing them today, nearly a half-century after they were made, a moviegoer thinks of lurid Hollywood love stories like Duel in the Sun, but with a much higher body temperature, and especially of Latin American telenovelas, those churning mixtures of female concupiscence and narrative coincidence. The world-class Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar learned much from them, though it's not known if he used the Sarli-Bó films as his models." ==Notes==