Juana la Loca (Vicente Aranda, 2001): Praise for a Visionary

Abstract

At a time when historical narratives were booming, Vicente Aranda fell in love with the character of Juana I of Castilla (1479 -1555), a figure so controversial that she went down in history with the nickname of Juana la Loca. The project was able to count on the historiographical revisions compiled from new and exhaustive consultations of archives of the time. Aranda and his collaborator on the script, Antonio Larreta, organized fictional materials well-founded by extensive documentation in the same direction indicated in 1993 by the homonymous historical novel by Guillem Viladot from Lleida or, more generally, in the precious work of Bartolomé Bennassar La España del Siglo de Oro (1982) where the French Hispanist reviewed the role of princesses, future queens or not, in international political alliances particularly related to American colonial policy and eventual support from the daughters of the Catholic Monarchs to the Communities of Castile (1519-1521) that tried to oppose the imperial power of the Habsburgs. History, oral, cultural or of mentalities, brings us closer to the gender perspective, one of the main themes of Aranda's filmography. The Barcelona filmmaker wanted to revisit the delirious image reaffirmed by the successful film Locura de amor (1948) by Juan de Orduña whose most novel aspects will be analysed in its double historical and psychological facet.