By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald staff

FEVER. In Argentina, regardless of social strata and circumstances, it’s a running joke — so many years after the original anecdote — that sexploitation actress Isabel Sarli, in one celebrated skin flick, sultrily looked at a sexual attacker and asked him, “¿Qué pretende usted de mí?” (What is it now, what do you want from me?). Or, in another scene, a gang bang rapist, pushing her a over a beef side, lustily exclaimed, “¡Carne sobre carne!” (“¡Flesh over meat!”).
The two scenes, culled from and repeated over and over even by those who hadn’t seen the movie in question or any other Sarli flick for that matter, became synonymous for the sex bomb with long, jet-black hair and naturally overendowed breasts, as well as this penchant for bathing nude at every available opportunity. Which was very often, on screen, at least. Almost invariably, one sex-starved man or a horde of them took a peek at the bathing beauty, concealed behind bush leaves, their genitalia bulging with excitement, a rush of fever through their heads.

IF NOT FOR YOU. Promoted with posters reading “Estrictamente prohibida para menores de 18 años” (NC18, an R-rating), the Bó-Sarli saga only whetted the appetite of young males eager to go through the initiation rite of watching an Isabel Sarli movie, often — and wrongly — associated with dark B-movie houses filled to the brim with “valijeros” (the trenchcoat crowd).

THUNDERBALL. Isabel Sarli, bodily well endowed but with no acting skills to speak of; and Armando Bó, who had no background as producer-director, made El trueno entre las hojas, based on Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Basto’s novel of the same title, in 1958. The film was a box office hit and a sensation here and abroad. The Sarli-Bó team went on to churn out a long string of skin flicks invariably featuring Sarli as a bathing beauty, a seductress or a sex-starved married woman forced to commit adultery in order to fulfill her carnal needs.
In many ways, Bó and Sarli epitomized the film material authoritarian Argentine government censors predated on. Too much skin — cut. Titillation — cut. Non-consensual sex — cut. Explicit or implicit sex-driven scenes — cut.
Whatever was left of the original movie had to be re-edited and put together as the real thing.


Argentine audiences never got to see the full productions, just bits of nudity and lust that created a success de scandale.

A STAR IS BORN... ABROAD. But foreign audiences — mainly the US and the Far East — did get the real thing, the uncensored prints which made male audiences rush with feverish imagination to the nearest sleazy movie theatre for a fix of raw, wild, Latin American female nudity and kink.
Ignored or blasted by critics in sanctimonius circles, Sarli became an international attraction, appearing on the pages of the movie industry magazine Variety and on huge ads in New York’s main newspapers. In the US and other countries, the Bó-Sarli pair were given the kind of recognition they were denied at home.

THEY’RE SOOO COOL. With the passing of time and the reappraisal of their work — now regarded as amusing, ridiculous and naive — Sarli acquired cult status even among the intelligentsia: camp, kitsch, ingeniously naive, endearing rarities that spoke of entire generations’ first acquaintance with and exposure to filmed erotica.
This story, which film connoisseurs are familiar with but general audiences are unaware of, is the stuff of a new feature-length movie (the director rejects the “documentary” label) wisely entitled Carne sobre carne.

A HUSH-HUSH AFFAIR. Lovingly compiled, written, produced and made by film critic-writer Diego Curubeto, Carne sobre carne, alluding, of course, to the oft quoted and misquoted scene from the film Carne, comes across as the testimony of a sex diva who played femme fatale but was otherwise a far from impudent woman with insatiable carnal urges.
An expert in B-movies and the story of Hollywood movies made in Argentina or with some connection with it, as his book Babilonia gaucha attests to, Curubeto happened to interview Sarli — after retirement and life in seclusion — on several occasions, one of them for a Channel Four (BBC) documentary. Curubeto agreed to do it, and up he went with the BBC crew to Sarli’s mansion in the northern BA suburb of Martínez.

IN THE CAN. It was in the course of the interview that Curubeto spotted a few cans of film stock, to which he directed his gaze. So did Sarli. When the diva was about to explain what that stuff was, Curubeto hushed her down.
The BBC crew gone, and Curubeto visiting the mansion on several other occasions, he dared ask Sarli about the bulk of film cans.
“Oh, there’s lots of its. I’d like to get ride of all this stuff. Film strips left on the editing rooms’ cutting floor, scenes deleted by censors, or scenes included in foreign prints but pruned out for Argentine audiences,” Sarli said, attaching no importance to the treasure trove of unseen filmed stock.
Offered the material, Curubeto loaded three trucks of film stock, storing the stuff who knows where.
That was probably the genesis of Curubeto’s Carne sobre carne, which follows three main narrative lines: Sarli herself, Armando Bó, and censorship in Argentina.
Curubeto staunchly denies he had a project in mind. “I never deviced this project. I just chanced upon it. It came my way.”
And a fortunate turn of chance it was, for Carne sobre Carne is as entertaining a piece of filmmaking as a trutfhful and loving account of Isabel Sarli’s rise to fame, international stardom, derision at home, her love and cinematic pairing with Armando Bó, and their joint fight against Argentine censorship.

NO GLAMOUR, NO GLITZ. Interviewed at her mansion, speaking to the camera or to an unseen reporter, Sarli is truthfully presented as the warm, genuinely simple woman she is and always was, devoid of any trace of diva-dom whims and glamour.
Curubeto’s script intelligently concentrates on Sarli the woman to only then move on to the (tangential?) issue of her sex symbol status, her devotion for Bó, the only man in her life, and her revelations and anecdotes — told in endearingly unadorned fashion — about herself and her love for Bó, with whom she beca,e Argentina’s grossing film export.

YOU GIMME FEVER. “Fuego (Fever) was a world phenomenon. In 1970, at New York’s Rialto, it earned one million dollars in box office revenue. At just one theatre!,” Curubeto underlines.
“But Fuego was banned in Argentina, and whenever news came on Associated Press wires about the film’s unstoppable success, journalists were unable to pick it up due to censorship. Those same journalists, given the chance, laughed heartily at the sketchy, far from neat storytelling skills of Armando Bó. They made fun of Bó and Sarli because their film narratives made no sense. How could them, after being mercilessly cut by censors!
“Armando Bó was hugely victimized. He was a victim of the dictum, ‘Keep on telling lies, something will stick!’, an awful thing to do. Censorship no longer exists in Argentina, but another form of it still remains, an ever growing form of censorship: snobbish intolerance.”

KNOCKING THEM DOWN. Curubeto’s Carne sobre carne, with unaffected testimonies by Sarli interspersed with animated bits illustrating her words, sometimes portraying her as some kind of Wonder Woman knocking out censors and detractors, is so intelligent a film work that it whets viewers’ appetite for more, much like the followers of the duo at their height.
In this sense, and in paying tribute to a sex goddess who still raises eyebrows for her unquestionable honesty and naivety, Curubeto’s Carne sobre carne is, above all, an invaluable and enjoyable document about a woman, a man, and their joint toils and travails.