El Escapulario is a stylish Mexican ghost story made by Churubusco Azteca studios in 1968. The director, Servando Gonzalez, is unknown to me but was, obviously, an impressive craftsman and the movie is gorgeous, splendidly shot in astonishingly atmospheric black and white by the great Gabriel Figueroa. The plot is carefully constructed and the dialogue is well-written if a bit florid by contemporary standards. The narrative has the cunning art of delaying revelation of key information with the effect that aspects of the film that seem puzzling on first encounter are clarified as the movie progresses. The picture isn't really scary but it has a convincingly fatalistic and eerie mood that is skillfully maintained from beginning to end. I can't make great claims for the movie but it completely succeeds on its own terms and sustains interest for its ninety minute length. The picture cost me $1.99 to rent for 48 hours on Amazon Prime and, if you choose to pay to see the film, you won't regret your expenditure. I think Figueroa's outstanding photography itself justifies watching the movie. The images in the movie are fantastically tactile -- the picture is a symphony of textures. In the opening scenes, we see characters moving across cobble-stone streets and plazas at night, lit obliquely with raking illumination that causes each dimple of stone to manifest with an uncanny force; the mottled cobble-stone surfaces are contrasted with the bark of tree trunks also in view that have a wholly different texture. A woman is dying in a bed that is imprisoned in elaborate curlicues of wrought iron -- the German word for these kind of arabesques (Schnorklig) perfectly describes the baroque twists in the metal and the shadows that they cast. Spaces are enclosed by heroic-looking walls also made from masonry studded with gem-like field stone and there are bridges and intersecting aqueducts that look like fine-grained Piranesi engravings. When one of the doomed heroes rides out to meet a woman at her country estate, the man's passage through the country is recorded by tracking shots along strangely feathery trees with melting soft foliage. Figueroa is influenced by the spectacular compositions in Eisenstein's footage shot for his aborted Mexican film (released as Que Viva Mexico) -- campesinos are framed in pyramidal masses against the sky, sombrero's glowing with lunar radiance under storm clouds. In one sequence, Figueroa makes every shot rotate around a cathedral-like church; the interior of the church is brilliantly white and radiant. The opening sequences are shot with figures vanishing into the haze of dust storm. A cantina is vibrant with adobe brick walls that seem to overhang the characters. Everything in the film is shot with such tangible presence that you can feel the hardness of the rock, the cobbles underfoot, the adobe bricks leaking sand onto the barroom floor as they crumble and the skies are always dark and tempestuous.
The film has an elaborate flashback structure with a double frame. At first, we see a man being led to execution by firing squad. Before the man can be shot dead, he bares his breast, shows the title scapula, a sort of large belt-buckle size religious talisman, and implores his executioners to fire in such a way as to not damage the pendant. Someone rides into the dusty, ruinous village where the execution is about to take place and shouts that there has been a last-minute reprieve. The scene, then, shifts to a still, spookily empty street where the camera lurches along, simulating the point of view of someone who has come to summon a priest to the bedside of a dying woman. The priest is handsome, but seems somewhat vague and distant; it's as if he's distracted. The POV walks along the night-time street, leading the priest to the sickbed. Hiding in the corner of the frame are two wretches who are plotting to waylay the priest, rob him and slit his throat. At the woman's bedside, the priest hears her confession and, then, she implores him to listen to her story, a complicated family tale about the scapula. The woman, it seems, had four sons -- there is a picture of them on the wall -- and she seems determined to narrate how these young men came to grief. Her first story, about her son Julian, brings us back to the dusty hamlet and the firing squad. Julian, who has deserted the government ranks to fight in the revolution on the side of the Indian insurgents (a flashback within a flashback) is sent to sabotage an armored train. He succeeds in this mission but is captured and condemned to death. (These scenes have something of the raw, visionary atmosphere of Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.") Julian has been spared so that he can be tortured, presumably, to reveal more information about the insurgents. But in the foggy dawn, after an interlude at night (soldiers sing Golondrinus Oaxacarena -- the "sparrows of Oaxaca"), Julian tries to escape with the help of a disenchanted Federale. Ultimately, he is killed, although the Indians march through the fog, probably launching an attack on the soldiers. The movie, then, reverts to the deathbed where the woman begins the story of her second son, Pedro, a "saddler" who works with his uncle Juan, a man who has had his tongue cut out and can only communicate by grunts and high-pitched creepy squeals. Pedro is in love with Rosario who seems to be a rich man's daughter -- in fact, she is the older man's ward and, in a melodramatic twist, he is cheating her out of her inheritance. The beautiful young woman's guardian, fearing Pedro's involvement, sends a message to him, luring him to his remote country estate where he plans to murder him. Pedro rides through an increasingly surreal landscape and encounters three men who have been hanged, rebels dangling from the strangely soft-looking and pillowy trees -- again, this is reminiscent of Bierce. One of the rebel Indians is still alive somehow and he leads Pedro to the gothic manor in the country where the girl's guardian is waiting to ambush him. The guardian drops dead out of a balcony in a startling scene, smote dead by God, it is said, who is a wrathful God in this film. The hanged man says that he is cold and demands Pedro's serape. Pedro flees the country estate and comes upon the three hanged men still dangling over the trail. One of them now wears Pedro's serape. From this point on, the story becomes more obviously supernatural. The movie reverts back to the frame-story at the woman's death bed and there are more ghostly revelations, many of them unexpected. The film has some of the quality of Juan Rulfo's great Pedro Paramo, a famous Mexican novel that describes the country's nightmarish revolution in terms of dead voices echoing in the darkness in a ruined village that is quite literally a "ghost" town. Similar themes motivate the last ten minutes of El Escapulario -- characters literally don't know who they are or where they came from; it's like a dream from which you unable to awake. It seems that the violence of Mexican history has resulted in a nation of ghosts and sleepwalkers, people who have slipped out of real time to inhabit a zone of spectral nostalgia. El Escapulario is full of indirections and eerie visual rhymes -- the firing squad, for instance, returns in the form of soldiers riding into the country to hang their three prisoners. In the scenes involving Pedro, a sinister organ grinder plays Golondrinus Oaxacarena to signify the hero's love for Rosario. In the great church that dominates the village, the pipes of the organs have been carved and painted to resemble human faces with open lips, a chorus of angels or the damned depending upon how you interpret the image. In some ways, this film reminds me of a more diffuse, and more melodramatic, Ugetsu Monogaturi, Mizoguchi's great ghost movie.
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