The Passion of Berenice

Berenice is a middle aged widow without children, living with her godmother in Aguascalientes in Mexico and teaching at a commercial school. She lost her husband in a fire. When Rodrigo, her godmother’s nephew and a young doctor, moves to the town, something begins between them and her life changes deeply. The film puts the place that provincial morality assigns to a woman and the woman’s own wanting into the same scene. The account uses the mould of melodrama, but it looks from Berenice’s side. The house shared with the godmother stands as the concrete form of the watch being kept over her. Martha Navarro plays the lead in Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s hundred and one minute Mexican film, completed in 1976.