ARTURO RIPSTEIN, THE BAROQUE OF MISERY
Arturo Ripstein’s films both affect and disturb me. Besides feeling intense emotion when I watch his films, I know they affect me because, later on, I remember them much more clearly than most of the other films I have seen. I saw El lugar sin limites almost 30 years ago and I have not had the chance to see it agaln. However, I can remember the small, dark tragedy that takes place in that tumbledown brothel between the (in appearance only) fragile transvestite and brutal beings who feel their masculinity threatened and can neither accept nor tolerate it.
Ripstein’s films, especially as from when the scripts were written by Paz Alicia Garciadiego, delve into excess in a difficult way: they live and teeter on the edge of a knife without losing control of the result.
As any good heir of the surrealist ideas and amour fou of the Mexican period of his maestro Buñuel, he presents us with stories forged with the elements of the purest and most outrageous melodrama: volcano-like passion, abandonment and heartbreaking lost loves that is forced on the helpless characters and pushes them to voluntary o forced destruction.
These extreme stories of metaphysical squalor told from a standpoint of the grotesque are used by Ripstein to show the dark side of the human being, beyond the line of darkness and hidden on the other side of the mirror. Ripstein and Garciadiego’s characters are sick with loneliness and despair because they have been hurt or because they are evil and cruel in a way that is banal and ontological or because they are mean and heartless because poverty brings out the worst in the human being.
And, faced with that complete lack of the least of horizons, desperate people bring tragedy to themselves or to the innocent: They have abortions to prevent a new being from having a miserable existence or they murder their own children so that they do not fall into misery. In this way. Profundo carmesi and Así es la vida contain some of the hardest sequences I have ever seen.
And this small human universe of beings who are miserable on the one hand and evil and animalistic on the other wanders round a baroque and kitsch stage of vivid, profuse and asphyxiating misery that bursts into loud colours, ugliness and plastic. In Ripstein’s films, the dirt on the doors and walls becomes expressionist decor.
Sex is thick, warm (La mujer del puerto or La reina de la noche) and an expression of loneliness like an eternal return; violence is bare, bloodcurdling and essential like the blade of a knife; evil is exaggerated, simple like chance; death is the unavoidable price of blame or dependence; and everything else is a lie, a pointless joke.
Arturo Ripstein’s own, genuine view of this dark puppet show of a world, of its unfortunate creatures and poor monsters is never exempt of piety, which always accompanies those long sequence shots that bear the soul of his grotesque beings and, perhaps, our own.
Juan Bas.
Writer
