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Juan Sayago was released after eighteen years in prison for murdering Raul Trueba, a man who challenged him only to get in the duel in which he fairly lost his life. Juan returns to his town to live quietly, trying to rebuild his life.Read More »
The film tells the story of the Boteros, a middle-class Mexican family struggling against poverty after their father’s death. Ignacia (Egurrola) is the Boteros mother, a desperate woman who chooses to sacrifice the destiny of her three older children, in order to protect Gabriel (Laguardia) the youngest one. She believes Gabriel will climb the social structure and bring back the lost fortune to the family. But destiny has other plans for the Boteros and tragedy will overcome eventually. Based on the novel of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz.Read More »
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In “La perdición de los hombres”, Ripstein once again enters the world of misery, though his characters are not precisely outcasts as the fat nurse and her gigolo lover. This time he returns to his early free-style -it’s even in black and white-, as he tells the stories of normal people, who choose weird solutions to their predicaments and whose dreams occupy the same space and tone as their daily actions on the screen. Garciadiego rarely paints a “nice” male character. So here there are not only one but three machos, who play baseball and believe that man’s downfall is personified in women (in fact, the movie’s title is a verse from a popular ranchera that goes “Man’s downfall / Is the damned woman”). Garciadiego built her story a la “Pulp Fiction”, with the first act told after the resolution, so one has to wait quite a bit to know why two of the guys kill their pal, known as the “King of the Baseball Diamond”, while his widow fights for his corpse with his younger and prettier lover.Read More »
“La Nueva Jerusalem” is a small community of believers lead by Papá Basilio (Rabal) and Mamá Dorita (Jurado). They’re waiting for the second coming of Christ, so they’ve abandoned the world, searching for a new spiritual life. Mamá Dorita sees in young Tomasa (Gurrola) the signals of the chosen one. The young girl will be the new leader in “La Nueva Jerusalem”.Read More »
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The story of a disciplined and sexually driven man who keeps his family isolated in his home for years to protect them from the “evil nature” of human beings while inventing (with his wife) rat poison.Read More »
After serving 18 years for killing a man in a duel,a former gunman returns to his hometown determined to live a normal life, but the sons of the man he killed are bent on revenge.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes penned Arturo Ripstein’s 1966 debut.Read More »
Review
Highly stylized
Noted Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein (Deep Crimson) presents a highly stylized, almost stagebound, erotic melodrama about life in the 1940s in Mexico (filmed in the lush style of 1940s melodramas). It’s based on the story by Max Aub and penned by Alicia Paz Garciadiego. The narrative is in the form of a repetitious parable that is overlong, hitting many dull spots and at times insufferable to watch. It stays on message to show a series of themes (colonialism, class warfare, racial and idealogical divisions and revolutionary fervor in both Franco’s Spain and Mexico) based on real historical events and combines it with the fictional story of the willing enslavement to the upper-class of the peasant Indian Mexican named Nacho (Luis Felipe Tovar).
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Though recently in the Mexican movies we see basically the same kind of things like crossed stories or extremely “realistic” ones, or both, there are some things in the old ones that the new ones are forgetting: beauty. This movie is based in a true story where a man that is afraid to contaminate his family with the evils of the world (and actually he is already “contaminated”, and very), decides to lock them inside their house for years, avoiding them any kind of contact with the world, even throw the windows. Not happy just with this, he makes the kids work in the family business that is making poison to kill rats. The characters are confocal created, ambiguous and confused, such as anybody is, and themes like loneliness or sexual curiosity in the kids while they are growing up is very well managed. However, even it is a sad story, it is so well treated, that it is beautiful. This is a movie that I would certainly recommend, specially because Mexican movies has not good fame. [imdb]Read More »