Selena y Los Dinos (dir. Isabel Castro)
Towards the final stretch of Selena y Los Dinos, director Isabel Castro’s documentary changes ever so slightly. And it does so into something that is genuinely intriguing for one of these celebrity biographies, something that I wasn’t expecting and hit me in the face like one of Selena Quintanilla’s pitch perfect notes. Obviously, the story of Selena is already extraordinary—both the world-changing highs and the most tragic of lows—but Castro generally plays it pretty standard. There are the humble beginnings, the family’s push into the entertainment industry, the breakthroughs and her rise as the Queen of Tejano Music, the rebellious marriage and the international recognition that comes from winning a Grammy Award and selling out stadiums. Then there is her death at the hand of a fan and employee who wanted to take advantage of their position, something the film doesn’t devote so much of its near two-hour runtime to. We don’t even see the face of the perpetrator. Smart.
It’s following all of this that Selena y Los Dinos did something I didn’t see coming. It’s here where the movie jumps forward to 2024 to the Selena Museum in Corpus Christi, Texas. We see Selena’s father, Abraham, mulling about behind a desk while fans old and new quietly look at stage costumes and platinum records hanging on the wall like relics of another world. We see her sister, Suzette, continuing to work as Chief Executive Officer at the family production company, Q-Productions. Videos of Selena run on a monitor in a production suite. Somebody is out there remastering all of her records for the streaming market Briefly, Selena y Los Dinos becomes more than just a tribute to a beloved cultural icon. Briefly, it becomes about the ghosts that haunt the family of a star. It becomes about how so many of these people have been unable to move on either by chance or by deliberate choice, both of which carry with them a weight that I wished the film had attempted to explore even a little bit. It momentarily wrestles with an estate for a celebrity who never got to become the titan she was clearly going to be and whose violent end has left those behind in a sort of limbo. Selena was everything and in some way for some people she remains that way 30 years after her death.
Selena’s story is well known by this stage, three decades later. It’s fair to assume the target audience of Selena y Los Dinos are those (like myself) who are already fans. We’ve had Gregory Nava’s pretty great movie starring Jennifer Lopez (nothing about the movie or the controversy of Lopez’s casting is mentioned), we’ve had a television miniseries that’s also available on Netflix. And the sensation around her murder produced hours of content for the gutter side of television. Although Castro’s film does have the luck of arriving with previously never-before-seen material of the performer and her family.
But as is usually the case with these sorts of estate-sanctioned biographies, it is disappointing that Castro’s film wasn’t able to really plumb some of the murkier elements of her subject’s life and career. Not the salacious stuff, but the complex and the uncomfortable. Disappointing but not surprising. It isn’t remotely interested in any way to the ideas that those couple of minutes deep into its runtime suggests are bubbling away under the surface. It also isn’t all that interested beyond the mildest of insinuations to the tactics of Selena’s father in pushing his children to have the music career he couldn’t. And I really did get the sense that some of the Quintanilla children were holding back in some areas of the story. Sexual harassment, misogyny and racism all factor into Selena’s life and Castro is wise at least to underline them when they do.
Castro is a good storyteller at least, even if it’s one many of us will have heard before. The director is clearly a fan and has the interests of Selena in mind—that is probably why there is a section devoted to the performer’s love of fashion and her dedication to really embracing her Mexican heritage. Stuff that fleshes her out beyond a musical idol. You can forgive the Quintanilla family for these tendencies, too. I’m sure they have dealt with all manner of grave-robbing opportunists who want to exploit the memory and the legacy of this legend. It does nobody any favours to enter such a project in bad faith with the aim of being rabble-rousing just to not be a clichéd biography like so many that we have seen before. But buried here underneath the sequin bustier tops, the sparkling pantsuits and rhinestone gowns is a nugget of a truly unique cinematic point of view that I wished we’d gotten the chance to uncover.
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