Film to show doomed love of Spanish matador

By Elisabeth O’Leary

MADRID (Reuters) – The triumphs of the bullfighter Manolete
and his tragic early death in 1947 have become legendary in
Spain, but his eyebrow-raising relationship with actress Lupe
Sino has been largely ignored.

A new film with Hollywood stars Adrien Brody and Penelope
Cruz is about to fill this gap in Manolete’s otherwise
well-documented life story.

Manolete’s death at just 30 years old stunned Spain, still
reeling from a bitter civil war in the late 1930s.

Historians and biographers say the matador helped meet the
national need for diversion and relief in the age of fascist
dictator Francisco Franco, when bullfighters were like the rock
stars of today.

Manolete’s biographers wrote that Sino had a shady
reputation and was said to be after his money, but underlying
their words was a basic hostility to women in the bullfighting
world — graphically described by Joselito, another legendary
matador.

“The worst enemy a bullfighter can have is a woman. Women
are sweet wine which goes to your head easily and bends your
legs. And to be a bullfighter you have to be strong (…) with
legs of steel,” Joselito, a forerunner to Manolete, was quoted
as saying in a biography by Francisco Narbona.

Bullfighting has long been considered in Spanish-speaking
countries as an art rather than a sport, and an almost
exclusively male preserve.

Manolete’s mother and his professional circle disliked
Sino, partly because of the bullfighting lore that women and
bulls do not mix.

As Manolete bled to death after his fatal goring on August
28, 1947, Sino was barred from seeing him on “doctor’s orders”
in case the matador tried to marry her in his final moments.

Even then matadors earned a fortune, and a deathbed
marriage would have snatched the juicy inheritance from his
family.

Despite efforts to blacken her character, it is widely
accepted that Manolete and Sino were besotted with one another.

DANCE WITH DEATH

“There was a bit of an upset when he went to Mexico with
her, because they were living together and it was said she was
a loose woman … but they were very much in love,” Antonete, a
74-year-old retired bullfighter, told Reuters in an interview.

Manolete’s closest friends tried to persuade him to leave
her, but photographs show them looking relaxed and happy
together.

Director Menno Meyjes, better known as the scriptwriter of
“The Color Purple” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,”
says the film is about a love triangle — of sorts.

“She is in love with him, he is in love with her, but he is
also in love with death,” he says in an interview released as a
preview to the movie. Filming of “Manolete” ended in July, and
the premiere is due next year.

“He meets this marvelous woman who tries to seduce him to
separate him from the dance with death which is part of his
life, his identity … And that creates enormous tension in
their relationship,” he said.

TRAGIC-LOOKING FACE

Meyjes said he became fascinated by Manolete’s face —
Adrien Brody looks uncannily like him — because he was so
tragic-looking. When researching the matador’s life in Spain,
he asked about Lupe Sino and was repeatedly told she was a
“loose woman.”

“However, at the end of my trip I met some people who were
friends of Manolete and they told me that he was always asking
her to marry him, and she would never accept. Then I started to
think what a fascinating person she must have been,” he said.

Experts say Manolete himself became the stuff of legend not
only because of his innovation in the ring, but because he made
bullfighting more popular than ever as a spectacle, before the
arrival of television.

“He drew crowds at a time when Spain was full of hunger and
misery, in the years after the war. People would say ‘I’m going
to pawn my mattress so I can see Manolete,”‘ laughed Antonete.

Antonete was inspired by Manolete at the age of 9.

“Manolete started to use his left hand as well as his right
– which is now commonplace — and he impressed everyone with
his nobility inside the ring and out. He used to fight in
villages, not just at the big bullrings, because he used to say
that humble people deserved to see a bullfight too.”

Manolete died just as Antonete was about to make his debut
in Madrid, aged 16.

“It left me feeling empty. I thought twice about whether to
go ahead after a bull had killed the best matador,” he said.

Documentary footage, shot just over a month before Manolete
died, shows the bullfighter in his ‘suit of lights’ facing a
half-tonne bull in Madrid, one of his legs drenched with blood
from a goring.

Manolete insisted on completing the necessary “manoletinas”
he had created — sending the bull swirling around him, using
his cape and sword but with his left hand behind his back.

Having dominated and dizzied the animal, the matador
lunged, pushing his sword deep into its neck and piercing its
heart in the final and most difficult act of the “corrida.”

Only then did he allow himself to be helped from the ring.

That was a dramatic preview of the bullfight weeks later in
Linares in Andalusia, where he was fatally gored by the bull
Islero — famous in its own right after that moment — just as
he sent his sword deep into the animal’s neck.

Manolete died from the bleeding 24 hours later.