russian roulette
By Douglas Messerli
Paz Alicia Garciadiego (screenplay, based on a story
by Juan Rulfo), Arturo Ripstein (director) El imperio de la fortuna (The
Realm of Fortune) / 1986
If there is
one thing Mexican film director Arturo Ripstein brilliantly achieves—and
fortunately, he is multi-gifted—it is to capture the character of Mexican and South
American idiot-bullies who, living in isolated poverty, play out a machismo ethos that ultimately destroys
all of those around them and, eventually, themselves. One might almost argue
that such figures of destruction almost obsess Ripstein, as he returns to them
time and again, a bit like the American writer Flannery O’Connor focused so
many of her works on similar kinds of low-class hillbilly sham artists,
rapists, murderers in her vision of the American South.
At times, given the overwrought realism of
Ripstein’s scenes, his films become almost unbearable to watch. Even if you can
bear with the low-down dirt floor grittiness of The Realm of Fortunes’ sets, it may be hard for the average
film-goer to watch the central character, Dionisio Pinzon (Ernesto Gómez Cruz)
drag his dead mother, wrapped in a woven wooden mat, around town, before
burying her by hand (and later, digging up her body parts which, in the passage
of time, have been dislocated perhaps by wild animals, local farmers, and
natural causes).
Later,
Dionisio, who begins the film as a kind of town crier, acquires a game cock,
which demands we watch several brutal cock fights wherein, in each case, one of
the cocks is decapitated or simply plucked to death. When the dead cocks are
tossed out in a nearby alley, old women, obviously with starving families to
feed, poorer than even Dionisio, quickly gather them up. Even Dionisio’s
beloved winning cock, Blondy—whom he has saved from death—is sacrificed out of
vengeance, the handler breaking the cock’s ribs before loosing him into the
fighting arena, an act ordered by the local “padrone,” Lorenzo Benavides
(Alejandro Parodi).
Throughout the film, in fact, death haunts
this terribly common human being, who ignores the death of his servant-like
mother (Socorro Avelar), while attending to his beloved Blondy. Indeed,
wherever Dioniso goes, death seems to follow, without him realizing that he and
his actions are behind it. Lured into the world of cock handlers and gamblers
by Benavides, Dionisio suddenly finds himself with a little a bit a money and a
life so transformed that he can suddenly imagine Benavides’ girl, La Caponera
(the singer, stunningly portrayed by Blanca Guerra), might even be sexually
attracted in him. The scene in which these two haunted beasts come together in
the “backroom” warehouse of a tawdry bar is almost impossible to watch,
particularly given the beautiful Caponera’s almost total abandonment to lust.
Whereas the fool Dionisio once had nothing
to his name, he now has a vulgar new bejeweled vest, money in his pocket, a
casket decorated in ridiculously bad taste, and a “living” amulet in the form
of his new lover. After a few more gambling wins, the birth of a daughter, La
Pinzona (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez), and the purchase of a truck, he returns to
the estate (formerly
a Catholic boarding school) owned by Benavides in order to bet against his
former teacher. He wins everything, including the building, entrapping his wife
(just as had Benavides previously) within. Gambling each night away with local
thugs, with la Caponera forced to sit nearby, he passes the rest of his empty
life meaninglessly winning card game after card game. His daughter grows up
practically wild.
In one final resolute attempt to escape,
his wife takes her daughter to a local fair, hoping to link up once again with
the small combo with whom she once performed. But in the years she has gone
missing, they have taken up with another, younger singer, and sadly reject what
they now perceive as an old woman with little charm. Like Mamma Rose in the
American musical Gypsy, La Caponera
quickly dresses up her daughter to replicate her younger self, but the girl—torn
between her mother’s betrayal of Dionisio and the fact that La Caponera cannot
ever truly leave her husband—refuses to perform, Dionisio quickly arriving to
gather up his two missing “possessions.”
What this unimaginative and stupid compesino
does not perceive is that in his attempt to hold on to all that he has amassed,
he has been playing yet another game, this one similar to Russian Roulette.
Time and again, in his abusive nights of meaningless amusement he has put an
invisible gun to his head that threatens to shatter everything that might be of
meaning.
In one final long night, with his wife
sitting on a couch nearby, Dionisio begins to lose— game after game after game.
Slowly throughout the night he loses his vast wealth, and, finally, bets and
loses his house. Only at the end of his self-involvement (reminding us of the
death of his mother early on in the film) does he realize that during his orgy
of gambling, the drunken singer has died. In anger, he kicks her, blaming her
for leaving him just as he had previously blamed his mother.
His amulet gone, he retreats into another
room to shoot himself in the head.
In the final scene we observe his now promiscuous
daughter, raised upon a small stage just as was her mother, singing a song
about roses. Despite the fact that we see in her actions that she, like her
parents, is trapped in the world she inhabits, we also perceive through her beauty
and the loveliness of her song just what her mother, La Coponera, proffered to
the poor, ignorant beings of the villages she haunted.
If Ripstein’s film has presented us with stereotyped
individuals who seem doomed in their preordained behaviors, we also have been
forced, by movie’s end, to lay aside what might have begun as dismissal and
disgust as we now lament the death of such misled dreamers as La Coponera and
the impoverished Dionisio. In telling their predictable story, accordingly, the
director and his writer have also helped to redeem what otherwise might be perceived
as empty lives. Dionisio, despite the lurid attractions of money and power
which destroyed him, truly only loved two things he encountered in his life,
his cock Goldy and his singing wife.. If only he could have more carefully focused
upon what he loved instead of being distracted by his in-cultured values. If
only we could all say we loved so passionately as he did
Los Angeles, June 20, 2014
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