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Luis María Delgado's Diferente (1961), an infrequently seen cult classic of Spanish cinema, had its premiere fifty years ago, at the height of General Franco's dictatorship. Little known outside of Spain, Diferente has occupied a similarly marginal position in the history of Spain's cinema. On the one hand, Delgado's film has little in common with the auteurist cinema developed in the 1950s by the likes of Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis Garcia Berlanga and continued in the 1960s by the directors of the Nuevo Cine Español. On the other, given its strong reliance on the conventions of Hollywood classic cinema, Diferente is equally at odds with the main trends of Spanish popular cinema. And yet, despite this marginality, or rather precisely because of its ex-centric status, Diferente has resurfaced in various recent historical surveys of Spain's cinema (Heredero, Torres, Gubem). Pedro Almodovar, too, has been a big admirer of this long-forgotten film (Aronica 64-5).'
While critics are divided as to Diferente's artistic merits, there is greater consensus in regards to its important contribution to the history of the Spanish film musical as well as to its groundbreaking depiction of a non-normative masculinity. On this account, Diferente is widely accepted as a landmark film because its protagonist, Alfredo (Alfredo Alaria), is, as film historian Augusto Martínez Torres puts it, "el primer homosexual declarado del cine español" [the first self-proclaimed homosexual in the history of Spanish cinema] (208). Yet even this characterization is in dispute. Alberto Mira, for instance, questions whether Alfredo can be properly described as a homosexual, since his sexual orientation remains purposefully ambiguous throughout the entire film. According to Mira, only by deciphering the many coded signs strewn throughout the film could a viewer make any inference about the character's potential homosexuality (79-80). And, in truth, there is something "different" about Alfredo, but the nature of this otherness is revealed indirectly, through physical gestures, sartorial choices, the exhibition of cultural tastes, and a generalized anxiety about all things sexual. The film's miseen-scène, music, and deployment of light, color, and editing further contribute to the representation of a troubled, nonconformist masculinity.
Given then Alfredo's fluid sexual identity, perhaps the unorthodox masculinity emerging from Diferente's interstices might more appropriately be described as queer. As Alexander...