| Summary: | The paper deals with one of the most popular female projections or phantoms of male desire, that is the charmer who never cedes, by comparing some literary and cinematic texts. This “allumeuse” which turns men into puppets in a dynamic of impossible seduction is the protagonist of La Femme et le Pantin (1898) by Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925), whose unforgettable Conchita from Sevilla was inspired by the young Charpillon who maddened the expert seducer Casanova. Conchita’s fame was deepened by the numerous adaptations of the text for the screen, especially von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935) starring Marlene Dietrich, Duvivier’s La Femme et le Pantin (1959) with Brigitte Bardot, and Buñuel’s free and outstanding reinterpretation in Cet obscur objet du désir (1977). In the end, the adaptation of the novel Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura (1874) by Portuguese Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) which Manoel de Oliveira directed in 2009 will be evoked to argue that the unattainable female character could represent a projection of the male protagonists’ desire and romantic idealizations as well as of their fears and bourgeois conventions.
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