South of a Passion
(Al sur de una pasión)

Susan is nearly a teenager and works as a babysitter looking after a boy called Felipe. She is also the lover of Felipe’s father. Susan lives in a boarding house with her own father, a downtrodden tango singer. They work in a sieazy nightclub, dancing as a couple to tango music. Their relationship is incestuous, and marked by the fact that Susan’s mother abandoned them when she was a little girl. The father becomes an alcoholic and his life starts rolling downhill. He ends up in jaii. The only way Susan can think of to repay her father’s debt and get him out of jaii, is by deliberately choosing to work as a prostitute. In her loneliness she meets another prostitute, Lili, who lives in the same boar- ding house. An ambivalent, frustrated relationship links these two women. Lili represents everything that Susan is afraid of : the détérioration of the body, failure. While her father is still in jaii, she is successful in the nightclub thanks to the influential lover she takes on. She achieves the bourgeois symbols she hated before (a fiât, clothes, “respectability”). One night, when she returns home, she finds her father waiting for her in the hall.