Arturo Ripstein's 2015 Le Calle de la Amargua ("The Street of Bitterness") is nothing less than astonishing. Ripstein is an excellent Mexican director and has been active making movies since 1961 -- as a teenager he worked on Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel and made his first Western when he was only 21. I have seen only a few of his films, all of which were extremely interesting and brilliantly directed. It seems a shame that he is not well-known in the United States -- so far as I know retrospectives of his movies are unknown in this country and his pictures seem to have been rarely, if ever, released here theatrically. You can watch Le Calle de la Amargua on a Kino Lorbeer DVD and, if you've never heard of this director, the film will be a revelation to you.
Shot in supernaturally beautiful black and white, Bleak Street (as it is called in English) takes place in the old historic center of Mexico City. In Ripstein's vision, the City center is a labyrinth of dismal, moldering alleys, full of medieval-looking alcoves and niches. People live in tenements with stairwells caged in spectacular, ornamental cast-iron balustrades and balconies -- the elaborate decorative iron-work casts webs of glorious-looking shadows when lit from behind and Ripstein sprays all of these lower depths with blinding rays of light that stab through the otherwise supernal darkness. Pools of water glint and blaze with reflected light. People live in holes with ancient exposed masonry that look like wet caverns. A wrestling ring is a glacial pier of white light at the center of a dark and gloomy arena -- through an entryway bathed in alabaster light figures move to and fro. Ripstein uses long takes to explore these spectacular environs, dollying and craning the camera through the chiaroscuro. In many respects, the film resembles German expressionist cinema or Orson Welles' more elaborate mise-en-scene (for instance in films such as Touch of Evil). There's a strong element of silent movies in the way that the characters emote, the outlandish plot, and the way some scenes simply dissolve into whirls of pale smoke -- the film features long interstitial black-outs, each extended one-take sequence ending in a fade to black and, then, light restored to show us another astonishing vista of poverty and misery. The film's extraordinary physical beauty elevates the fantastically sordid narrative into the realm of the archetypal -- at the end of the movie, the picture has advanced into the real of the tragic, like something from Greek mythology.
Two elderly whores, Dora and Arlita, work the mean streets of Mexico City. (They are called "senior sex workers".) The women are cynical, humorous, and very lonely. They haven't promoted themselves into pimping (like their former colleague Margara who seems to be about their age and is surrounded by a protective coterie of male homosexuals). Rather Dora and Arlita are the lowest form of streetwalker -- Arlita has to beg Margara for a particular corner to ply her trade and they turn tricks in auto garages and toilets to make a living. Dora has a boyfriend, a nasty old street-conjuror named Max. She also has a daughter who is about 15 who despises her -- she and her daughter quarrel about a cell-phone. Dora's daughter hates her mother's profession, but is on the road to becoming a whore herself. Arlita lives in a sort of wet catacomb with an elderly woman who is immobile and apparently reeks of piss. Arlita abuses the old woman but also love her and, even, gets out of her bed to cuddle her on a mattress lying on the floor. The old woman is demented and, when Arlita doesn't want to see her face, she simply wraps rags around her jaw and head and ties them tight. Arlita has a crew of street kids who help her push the old woman in her tattered rags and reclining on a cart onto a street corner where she begs. The old woman is able to sing a little (she hums a tune) but she can't talk. Two mini-Luchadores, that is, midget-wrestlers, live with their wives and seem to be lower middle-class. (Their wives are full-sized women and each of the wrestlers has a child -- the little kids are always crying because they are afraid of the masks that the Luchadores wear throughout the movie.) The dwarf-wrestlers are so-called "shadows" -- that is, they are miniature versions of normal size professional wrestlers: thus, there is Muerte (Death) and little Muerta, both of whom enter the ring with sinister-looking scythes; the other mini-Luchadore is little AK47 who enters the ring with big AK47, also both of them carrying imitation automatic weapons. The two mini-Luchadores are identical twins. They are manipulated by their wicked mother who forces them to pay her tribute from their wrestling earnings. This woman is like a figure from mythology -- the fearsome mother whose love destroys her children whom she regards as special gifts from god. Needless to say, the brothers aren't happily married -- when they are introduced in the film, each of them is fighting with his wife and each slaps his spouse. The wives resent their mother-in-law's manipulative conduct that divides them from their husbands. The little wrestlers are highly belligerent, perpetually angry about being regarded as "mascots" as they are called in the film, and when someone says they are "diminished" (referring to their size) brawls result.
Ripstein's film inexorably draws these alarming characters into a tragic relationship. The mini-Luchadores have decided to splurge on an orgy with the whores. The two women recall their "salad days' in which they had a lot of fun "dropping" johns and stealing their money. "Dropping" refers to putting so-called "eye-drops" in their victim's booze, knocking them out, and, then, absconding with their money. Arlita and Dora plan to "drop" the mini-Luchadores and steal their earnings from a big bout scheduled for the Arena Coliseo. After the fight, the whores meet the dwarf wrestlers and they go to an anteroom of Hell called the Hotel Laredo. (This place has an ice-white interior with floors made of translucent, illuminated tiles -- the sign advertises "Agua Caliente"; for some reason, it's huge with a palatial entryway that leads to a tiny booth where the two owners appear as if confined within a TV screen -- it's an image worthy of David Lynch.) The whores dose the midgets with the drops, but forget to adjust the amount of the knock-out serum for the size of their victims. We see the poor midgets dead in bed, more or less arm in arm with their little masks still in place. The law quickly descends on the scene and the hapless midgets, who were derided in life, become a cause celebre -- the media calls them valilant "Lilliputian gladiators." The pharmacist who supplied the eye-drops is fingered and she identifies the prostitutes. (The nasty pimp Margara is beat-up by the cops who aren't hesitant to use strong-arm tactics -- after she's roughed-up, we see her homosexual lieutenant tenderly comforting her.) Dora and Arlita plan to flee together although Arlita, who has been in prison before, commends incarceration as a "roof over your head, food, a blanket" -- the comforts of life as she sees it. Arlita uses the remaining drops to poison the old woman for whom she cares -- "you wouldn't leave a dog here alone," she says. The old woman hums herself to sleep. We see a shot of Dora's daughter raging in the alleyway: "What will happen to me?" she cries out. Dora is now alone. Her boyfriend, Max who is a transvestite homosexual, steals her better evening gowns, well-suited for whoring, and absconds. Dora and Arlita descend the elaborately steps in the tenement, plotting their escape, but they are apprehended on the first landing. As they are put in separate squad cars, Arlita faces the camera and says: "It was fate. All things pass."
The film somehow makes squalor magical. The miserable fable is ennobled by the way that it is acted and filmed. The mother of mini-Luchadores rages and claws at her husband's face in grief. At the funeral of her two sons, she places a rosary in each of their tiny caskets in which the boys are buried in their masks. (Other masked wrestlers are in attendance). There is something weirdly demonic about all of the characters. A lurid sense of doom hovers over every shot in the film. The acting is superb and the aging whores, who are not glamorized in any way, are both poignant and repellent. Everyone in the movie seeks to assuage a sort of fundamental grief at being alive and human -- even the nasty Margara has someone who cares for her. But betrayal is the rule of the streets and, in the end, everyone is left alone. The film's camerawork is spectacular. In one scene, the camera glides into a cafe where two detectives working on the case are discussing the matter. The cafe is a velvet light-trap full of dark shadow and bright glaring light. The camera sweeps by the cops and, then, explores above the bar where there is a TV showing coverage of the death of the mini-Luchadores. Then, the camera gracefully rotates to show us the pale figure of the pharmacy clerk advancing slowly into the cafe like an apparition signifying the doom of Dora and Arlita. Apparently, the film is based on true events that occurred in Mexico City. In 2009, two sex workers accidentally poisoned La Parkita and Espectrito Jr. (two mini-Luchadores) in a hotel in Cuahtemoc, blue collar neighborhood in Mexico City. Riptstein's film features a version of the song "Mexico" by Luis Mariano that is stunning in its own way. The song comes from Mariano's musical Le Chanteur de Mexico (1956) and is sung in French.
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