Cara Sucia
|
|
Cara Sucia was one of Venezuela's most popular telenovelas, and its most exported to international countries.
Produced by Venevision and filmed in 1992, Cara Sucia presents the story of Miguel Angel Gonzalez (played by Guillermo Davila) and Estrellita Montenegro (played by Sonya Smith, a very talented half Venezuelan-half American actress).
Miguel Angel is a member of one of Caracas' richest families, while Estrellita is a poor but hard-working beautiful girl who sells newspapers in a corner every day to earn a living. When they met, it was love at first sight, and as the story develops, they begin a beautiful romance that makes them begin to date and later get married.
But not everything is pink for the young couple and they have to survive, among other things, opposition by Miguel Angel 's parents, Horacio (Humberto Garcia) and Rebecca (Chony Fuentes); Horacio's declining mental health that makes him become more and more dangerous, the obsessive passion that evil Santa Ortigosa (Miguel Angel 's ex, played by Gigi Sancheta) feels for Miguel Angel, a partnership that Horacio creates with two drug dealers who end up murdered by him' when he finds out they are using him, the revelation that Estrellita's mother was killed by a younger Horacio because she left him for the man who would become Estrellita's father and the kidnapping by Horacio of Miguel Angel and Estrellita's boy twins once Miguel Angel and Estrellita had married and begun a family.
Miguel Angel's mom, Rebecca, however, begins to relent on her opposition towards Miguel Angel and Estrellitas love once she realizes she was wrong about Estrellita (she thought at first Estrellita was a gold digger) and that it was her friend and Miguel Angel's ex, Santa who was the actual gold digger, and that her husband wasn't the man he pretended to be.
Horacio, who during the time he had kidnapped the two twin baby boys grew to love them like his own sons, shoots himself after a police stand-off where the babies are wrestled away from him, while Santa dies when her car is driven off a cliff. Miguel Angel and Estrellita recover their babies and finally achieve the love and happiness they had hoped for, and Rebecca accepts her daughter in law and twin grandsons as new members of her family.
Filled with gaps and loopholes in the story (like most soap operas), Cara Sucia nevertheless still managed to keep its viewers on the edge of their seats most of the show's duration.