Theatricality/sexuality/performance: Neorrealism and the construction of identity in Calle Mayor and Entre Visillos

This article challenges the widely accepted notion that the protagonist in Juan Antonio Bardem's film Calle Mayor, Isabel, is not an object of sexual desire. The film shows a theatrical society where the characters constantly fabricate or refashion their own identities. These performative attitudes pose the question of an identity crisis/identity fabrication, which becomes the focus of Bardem's film. Isabel acts a doubly ambiguous signifier, precisely because the relationships between signified and signifier have been altered. I make cross references to another text of the same period and with similar preoccupations, and which also departs from a faade of Neorrealism to interrogate identity repression and the dangers of stereotyping: Carmen Martn Gaite's novel Entre Visillos.