By Dimitri Keramitas
France’s fourth Viva
Mexico film festival celebrated contemporary Mexican cinema with a series
of screenings and panel discussions this month, highlighting topics such as
climate change and the relationship between film and the visual arts.
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| A scene from Calle de la Amargura. |
The festival presented a diverse programme, with a
strong social interest, attracting French and Mexican academics as well as
Mexican filmmakers and actors. The screenings at the Luminor theatre, in a central area of Paris, included both fiction features and documentaries.
One of the event’s most notable films was Calle de la Amargura, directed by Arturo
Ripstein and written by his wife Paz Alicia Garciadiego (the couple also led
the festival’s master class).
Ripstein has been one of the pillars of Mexican cinema
for decades. It’s something of a family affair: his father was an important
film producer, and now his son is also a filmmaker. Calle de la Amargura is set in a poverty-stricken neighborhood (the
English title is “Bleak Street”), and depicts the struggles of a group of its
more marginalized denizens.
Based on a true story, the film deals with the
accidental – or negligent – homicide of two midget wrestlers, twin brothers
Alejandro and Alberto. They got mixed up with a pair of prostitutes who tried
to ply them with drugs, not realizing that the dose to knock out a normal adult
would result in an overdose for a much smaller person.
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| Marginalized characters in Calle de la Amargura. |
The film, shot entirely in black and white, spends
much more time with the two prostitutes than with the wrestlers. Adela and Dora
are both middle-aged and find it hard to make a living, especially when having
to turn over a large part of their earnings to their exploitative madams.
As in French director Jean-Luc
Godard's renowned movies about prostitution, the “oldest profession” here becomes a symbol of
capitalist exploitation. Ripstein films the life of the street with unrelenting
harshness, to the degree that we might think the movie is an exercise in miserabilisme—wallowing
in poverty.
But like Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Ripstein’s model,
the director adds something more to the depiction of poverty. Not the
surrealism of Buñuel, but a sense of artifice – the street looks like a theatre
set, though completely realistic, especially as the camera glides along it like
an inquisitive drone. The actors also bring a theatrical touch to their roles.
The result is a subtle unreality that suits the theme of destiny, the sense
that we’re all players in a cosmic game.
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| A shot of the 'bleak' street in Calle de la Amargura. |
Other motifs enrich what might be a rather dismal
march to the doom of the two pairs. There’s a curious emphasis on clothing and
masks. Dora is outraged when her husband prostitutes himself with young men,
wearing her clothes. On the other hand, the husband doesn’t want her to touch
his magician’s costume.
The midget wrestlers wear decorative masks, like many
wrestlers in Mexico, but they never take them off. Adela’s mother, an elderly
woman used as a begging prop, often puts a cloth over her face. When the
prostitutes arrange a tryst with the wrestlers, they cake their faces with
make-up. The surface artifice becomes an existential second skin, dissimulating
a suffering soul, a desire for self-invention, or perhaps an inner nullity.
More uplifting, or at least more human, is another theme,
that of relationships. Every major character, no matter how unprepossessing, is
significantly linked to at least one other person. These relationships tend to
be difficult, even parasitical, but they lend genuine spirit to the characters.
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| Director Arturo Ripstein. |
Adela, who exploits her elderly mother, takes care of
her needs and comforts her. Dora has a teenaged daughter she spoils even though
her maternal love is unrequited. She also has a strange, desperate intimacy
with her shiftless husband.
Likewise the two brother wrestlers are bound by
blood and physical particularity, and both are inextricably tied to an
overbearing mother who’s a religious fanatic. The most crucial relationship of
all is between the prostitutes and the wrestlers, who seem to enjoy their
rendezvous with each other, before it turns into an appointment with (to quote
the 2016 Nobel literature laureate Bob Dylan) “a simple twist of fate.”
Beautifully filmed by Ripstein and wittily scripted by
Garciadiego, Calle de la Amargura
looks unflinchingly at harsh social reality, but also at a mystery somewhere
beyond it. (Distribution: Oscar Alonso Festivals)
OTHER FILMS
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| A scene from Mr. Pig by Diego Luna. |
The other films in the festival (which is now moving
to French cities such as Avignon, Bordeaux and Lille) include: Los Bañistes by Max Zunino and Sofia
Espinosa (Best Film award at the Guadelajara film festival); La Delgada Linea Amarea by Celso Garcia
(winner of several prizes in Mexico, Latin America and Europe); Résurrection by Eugenio Pulgovsky (jury
prize at the Internacional Ciné Medioambiental Festival); Tempestad by Tatiana Huezo, about two women struggling against
oppression; Plaza de la Soledad by Maya
Goded (official selection at the Sundance film festival); La Région Sauvage by Amat Escalante, a
self-taught filmmaker who has won prizes at Cannes; Me Estas Matando Susana by Roberto Sneider; I Promise You Anarchy by Julio Hernandez Cordon; Mr. Pig by Diego Luna (Best Narrative
Feature, Dallas International Film Festival); and Somos Lengua by Kyzza Terrazas (Winner of prizes at FICUNAM and the
Festival de Cine Mexicano de Duarngo). There was even an animated film, Las Aventuras De Itzel Y Sonia by Mario
Fernanda Rivero (winner of the Best Film prize at the Cinema Planeta Festival).
Dimitri Keramitas is a legal expert and prize-winning writer based in
Paris.
