A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search This Blog

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, 1996)

Regina Orozco and Daniel Giménez Cacho in Deep Crimson

Cast: Regina Orozco, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Sherlyn, Giovani Florido, Fernando Soler Palavicini, Patricia Reyes Spindola, Alexandra Vicencio, Julieta Egurrola, Marisa Paredes, Rosa Furman, Verónica Merchant, Juan de la Loza. Screenplay: Paz Alicia Garciadiego. Cinematography: Guillermo Granillo. Production design: Mónica Chirinos, Macarena Folache, Antonio Muño-Hierro, Nava, Marisa Pecanins. Film editing: Rafael Castanedo. Music: David Mansfield. 

Arturo Ripstein's Deep Crimson carries a dedication in its credits to "Leonard, Martha, and Raymond," the director and protagonists of The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle, 1970). Ripstein has moved the events of Kastle's film to Mexico, and the actual "lonely hearts killers" Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez have become Coral Fabre (Regina Orozco) and Nicolás Estrella (Daniel Giménez Cacho), but the sequence of events follows pretty much the same brutal line as Kastle's film. Ripstein's is the more sophisticated version of the story, enhanced by the Sonoran Desert setting of much of the film and by the intense color of Guillermo Granillo's cinematography. The protagonists of Deep Crimson are perhaps even more psychotic than those of Kastle's, and the justice served up to them is ironically almost as corrupt as they are. In the end, it's a question of whether you prefer the low-budget earnestness of Kastle's treatment or the sardonic tone of Ripstein's.    

Posted by
Links: , , ,