don juan with migraines
by
Douglas Messerli
Paz
Alicia Garciadiego (writer), Arturo Ripstein (director) Profundo carmesí (Deep
Crimson) / 1996
For
several decades now, Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein has been making
memorable films about people who are propelled into dangerous or complex
relationships by the sometimes near-inexplicable forces of love. Some of the
best of these, such as Love Lies, Foxtrot, and Hell Has No Limits have been internationally shown, nominated for
and winning film awards. Others such as the 1996 Deep Crimson, recently released by Criterion Films, are lesser
known, but should be more renowned, at least as well known as the other cinema
version based on the 1940s true story "Lonelyhearts Killers," made
into the 1970 cult film, The Honeymoon
Killers.
Ripstein’s version begins with a short almost sepia-colored portrait of the heavyset nurse, Coral Fabre (nicely played by opera singer Regina Orozco), who works mostly out of her home when she doesn’t go to the hospital to help with embalming or simply lay in bed reading romances under a portrait of her favorite lover, Charles Boyer. She clearly resents the existence of her two children, the eldest of which tries to remind her mother of her familial duties. In this first sequence, the children go to bed hungry out of punishment for their mother having tortured an old man by failing to find a vein in which to properly inject his medicine.
Boyer, who played cads and murderers in
several love films (Back Street, Gaslight, The Earrings of Madame de…) is perhaps the perfect match for this
self-obsessed woman, desperate to find a lover. She finds that lover in another
low-minded cad, Nicolás Estrella (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who a bit like
Hitchcock’s Charles “Charlie” Oakley in his Shadow
of a Doubt, who, if you recall, marries and kills off wealthy widows for
his financial benefit. Estrella, however—although fairly handsome when he dons
one of his hair pieces—is far lower on the totem pole of shadiness. His victims
are single, divorced, or widowed women of limited means, whom he romances and,
without bothering to marry them, engages in sex before he steals their purses,
jewelry, or cars.
Coral, however, is below even his
standards. She smells of formaldehyde and, despite her complete readiness to
give in to any requests for sex, she is no beauty. Claiming a migraine
headache—a real infliction suffered by this third-rate Don Juan—he, upon saying
hello immediately claims he “must be going,” his quick departure signaling the
Marx brother comic elements of much of this movie.
But baby, “it’s raining outside,” and
the gigolo soon returns to take his prize, a quick fling with the large
breasted woman and the contents of her coin holder, a robbery she spots without
saying anything, as if she had already expected that she might have to pay for
sex, later joking that she was charged by the pound.
But this is no fragile victim who might
believe the lies he tells. The next day she shows up in his house with her two
children in tow, demanding that he take them in. Shocked by her hutzpah, he
insists that his life has no room for children yet permitting them to spend the
night.
Without blinking an eye, Coral trots off
her kids to the local adoption agency, returning to pry open her new lover’s
front door before rifling through his files to perceive the true nature of his
vocation.
Hardly bothering to drop a tear, she
suggests that they go into business together, she acting as his sister, while
serving, so to speak, as his manager, selecting and arranging for possible
victims.
The remainder of the film is a gradual deterioration
into another kind of hell, as they uncover all the wrong women and she,
jealously, spins the team into murderous behavior beginning by sickening with
rat poison one rather elderly woman who, to escape her boyfriend’s observation
has met them at a seedy, outlying bar. They give her a bus ticket to home,
while driving away in her rather stylish red sedan, later exchanging it for a
far cheaper model.
But it is clear that preying on women to
steal their love and assents is no easy job. As film critic Keith Phipps
quipped “there's no thrill to the kill, because there are always those bodies
to bury and stains to clean.”
When they decide that they have to
kill one of their would-be victims, along with her bratty little girl, because
of her demands that Estrella work as her mechanic for several months while she insists
on almost daily sex, they finally are so exhausted that they turn themselves
it, and openly accept their execution. Given the permission to run for their
lives as the local police stand behind them with their guns cocked, the worn-out
lovers simply stand in place, accepting their Bonnie and Clyde-like end.
There is often a very dark humor in all
of Ripstein’s films, but this has to be one of the most notable examples in
history of the clichés that not only “crime doesn’t pay” but that “love can
make you crazy.”
Los Angeles, July
3, 2018
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