“Remain calm and elegant”: dark games, vulnerability, and the female body as a plaything in Most Beautiful Island

Resum

Most Beautiful Island (Ana Asensio, 2017) portrays the struggle of Luciana, a Spanish illegal immigrant in New York. The film centres on Luciana’s acceptance of a suspicious yet well-paid job working at a party in place of her friend Olga, another illegal immigrant. At the party, she will become the object of bets and the plaything of a dark game. This article explores how Most Beautiful Island, a film made by a Spanish filmmaker in the US, uses narrative and aesthetic devices and discourses to explain the migratory experience of a particular group of women whose lives end up rather literally in the hands of the powerful. For this purpose, the article first studies vulnerability and precarity and the power of looking and the failures of witnessing, to then examine the discourses and conventions of dark play, particularly in fictional dark games in film, and how the film lays bare the torture and sadism of power relations. Thus, the aim is to lay bare the strategies of denunciation, enunciation, and resistance that Most Beautiful Island constructs around the invisibility and powerlessness of precarious subjects.