What if “movie magic” wasn’t just a way to refer to special effects, or the transportive power of movies? What if you could use a movie to literally cast a spell?
After reading Velvet Was the Night and being thoroughly underwhelmed by it, I had pretty much decided against reading anything else by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Then I heard a podcast in which someone raved about this book, so I decided to give it a try.
I listened to this one on audio, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
First of all, the main character’s name is Montserrat, which was a lot of fun to listen to with the way the narrator rolled her Rs. It sounds like a very dramatic name, which was fitting for a very dramatic book.
Montserrat is a movie sound editor in Mexico City in the 1990s. Her best friend, Tristán, is a struggling actor with a troubled past.
He was a soap opera star on the rise until 10 years ago when he got into a car accident with his girlfriend. He got scratched up, she died. He got blamed for the accident, despite the fact that she was the one driving at the time. He took the blame, but he’s still not really over the trauma of everything that happened.
He also hasn’t managed to get his career back on track, though he keeps hoping and trying and spending money like there’s no tomorrow. He also keeps going from one girlfriend to another, more out of fear of being alone than out of a desire to be with any one of them.
Montserrat has had a thing for him since they were kids, which Tristán knows, and Montserrat knows that he knows. But he shut her down the one time she tried to bring it up when they were still kids. She hasn’t tried to bring it up since. She has dated some, both men and women, but she’s mostly still married to her work and kind of holding a candle for Tristán, even though he’s a really bad friend.
He disappears from Montserrat’s life every time he gets a new girlfriend, then expects Montserrat to show up at a moment’s notice to help him pick up the pieces every time his latest fling dumps him.
Montesrrat recognizes the imbalance in their relationship, but she keeps showing up for him anyway, although she does set some boundaries. For example, she appears to love her car more than she loves Tristán, so she won’t let him borrow it.
It’s shortly after one of these doomed relationships has failed that Tristán has to find himself a new apartment. No sooner does he do so than he realizes one of his neighbors is none other than the legendary Abel Urueta.
Abel never managed to achieve the heights of fame he was aiming for, but he made some horror movies that Montserrat and Tristán consider to be classics.
The two friends have been horror fans since they were kids, although Tristán never had the stomach for it that Montserrat did, so she usually had to tell him when to close his eyes, which he did.
Tristán and Abel get to talking and eventually Abel tells Tristán and Montserrat about a particular movie he worked on early on in his career with a Nazi occultist, named Ewers, who had been kicked out of Nazi Germany because the Nazi’s feared his “magical abilities.”
Whether he really had magical abilities is up for debate, at least to start. Montserrat at one point finds his journal, starts reading it, keeps reading it, and then can’t stop thinking about it. Then she has to know more.
His theories involved the idea that certain people naturally had more magical abilities than others. It also involved the racist idea that white people naturally have more power than people of color. When he finds indigenous people who are also “gifted” he assumes it must be because they have some power in their ancestry, either through white conquerors or indigenous royalty.
He also believes in the magic of the movies!
No, literally, he thinks the combination of sound (the spell must be spoken aloud in front of an audience) and silver nitrate. At the time the book takes place, silver nitrate is no longer used in making movies, largely because of how flammable it is, but Montserrat says it makes sense that it would still have been in use at the time Abel was starting his career, and since I know very little about making movies, I’ll take her word for it.
Abel convinces Montserrat and Tristán (mostly Montserrat) that the movie they were making that never got finished was supposed to cast a spell. But Ewers was killed before the movie could be finished, which put a halt to everything, but not the magic, according to Abel.
Instead, the magic backfired, and instead of providing them all with power and riches, Abel’s promising career went down the toilet, and the stars of the movie never acted again.
Abel convinces Montserrat and Tristán to help him finish the movie so they can finish casting the spell. That way Abel can take advantage of the blessings of the spell, and Montserrat and Tristán can get in on the action, too.
They never get around to publishing the movie, but they do dub it so that the words of the spell can be spoken aloud, and at least at first, things seem to be going well. Montserrat’s sister’s cancer mysteriously clears up. Tristán gets an offer to star in another soap opera.
But then, as before, things take a turn for the worse. Tristán starts seeing Katrina, his dead girlfriend, everywhere.
Montserrat senses a dark presence following her.
Then Abel gets murdered and things go from bad to worse pretty quick, and that’s when I was all in. There’s not much I love more than magic, ghosts, and spellcasting, and this book has all those things.
SPOILER ALERT!!!
The only thing that irked me about this book was the fact that Montserrat and Tristán end up together at the end. It was obvious that was where the book was leading, and I don’t think Moreno-Garcia would have been comfortable ending it any other way, but I never felt like Tristán was good enough for Montserrat. I still don’t trust he won’t leave her broken hearted as soon as he gets distracted by another pretty face.
To be fair, they seem to be taking it easy at the point where the book ends. No one is hearing wedding bells, and I think they both know that Tristán has to prove himself before their relationship can make any serious strides, but I still want better for Montserrat.
I should say I listened to this one on audio. I don’t know if Moreno-Garcia’s writing is better when I listen to it than when I read it, or if this one was just better written than Velvet Was the Night. Either way, I’m not sure what to expect the next time I decide to pick up one of her books (if I decide to do so.)
The more I think about it, the more it seems like Velvet Was the Night was a rush job. If there is one aspect of Moreno-Garcia’s writing that has been consistent, it’s her publishing schedule. Maybe she ran out of time when writing Velvet Was the Night and didn’t have time to flesh it out as much as she would have liked.