Arturo Ripstein's treatment of a static short novel -- a frozen portrait -- by Gabriel García Márquez, the chief features of which are an impecunious old revolutionist awaiting an army pension that will never come, his asthmatic wife, and their sole material asset, a gamecock inherited from their slain son. The casual reader of the story might be in a state of mild amazement that anyone could have seen a movie in it. (It is a distant cousin to such tales of inaction as James's The Beast in the Jungle, Kafka's The Castle, Buzzati's Desert of the Tartars.) Screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego, Ripstein's long-time creative partner, has fleshed it out in plausible ways -- re-setting it in Mexico in the late Forties and identifying the protagonist specifically with the anticlerical side in the costly Cristero Rebellion of the Twenties -- without in the least distorting it, betraying it, juicing it up. In the main, however, Ripstein has seen a movie in it through the sheer power -- and painstaking detail -- of visualization. On the most basic level, the movie deals in the indignities of poverty and old age, and so every chip and crack in the plaster, every streak and splotch on the mirror, every dim little pool of Caravaggesque light, is eloquent. (The frugal, energy-conserving emoting of Fernando Luján and Marisa Paredes is eloquent, too.) For all its narrative stasis -- getting up in the morning is a major event, getting a new pair of shoes is a major triumph, getting to the post office every Friday is a major ritual -- the situation abounds in the essential Ripstein storytelling ingredient, something to set tongues wagging, whether just local gossip (as in Divine), scandal-sheet sensation (Deep Crimson), or the stuff of burgeoning legend (The Realm of Fortune). Though the radius of these wagging tongues may here be strictly small-town, and the volume diplomatically murmurous, the sensitivities of the old couple to just such attention -- "If you take the umbrella, don't open it. Someone might notice" -- mark them as more vulnerable than the average Ripstein misfit, less insulated within their own eccentricity. Which is another way of saying that the note of pathos is stronger and purer than usual, unfuzzed by irony. With Salma Hayek. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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