I'm not sure why anyone would want to remake Leonard Kastles' one-off The Honeymoon Killers (1970). That film, about a couple who rob and kill lonely women, was pretty unpleasant, if impressive in a dire sort of way. But one version of this grim story (based on real-life incidents) is enough. Therefore, I'm not sure why the great Mexican director, Arturo Ripstein, felt compelled to re-make the film in his 1996 Profundo Carmesi. Ripstein is extraordinarily gifted and his films have a savage immediacy that sometimes goes over the top in its depiction of cruelty and perversion. But the harrowing mayhem in Deep Crimson seems to me, somehow, gratuitous -- I'm not sure what Ripstein thought he was accomplishing by translating this feral little parable into the Sonoran desert of north Mexico. Perhaps, surprisingly, he adapts Kastle's eccentric movie with a great deal of fidelity to the film source -- he doesn't revisit the actual tabloid murders on which the story is based (in other words doesn't access the source of the source) but instead adheres quite closely to the 1960 film. Even the earlier picture's rather straitened appearance -- it was shot in black-and-white on no budget -- is replicated in Ripstein's extremely austere staging: the film takes place in impoverished monochromatic shacks and invokes a desolate landscape in which there are no villages, no inhabited places, so to speak -- this is a wasteland in which no one exists except for the predatory couple and their various victims. Despite the shots of vast desolate, treeless plains, the film has a claustrophobic feeling -- there's no escape. (I assume that Ripstein didn't want to go to the trouble of characterizing the era with cars and signs and other traces of the period in which the movie is set -- so he simply avoids showing anything that would establish exactly when the movie takes place or, even, where.) Similarly, Ripstein's characteristic mise-en-scene in which each extended shot comprises a sequence in the film contributes to the general sense of poverty. Ripstein's moving camera explores the interiors in which the film takes place and sequences aren't built up by editing shots together -- there are almost no close-ups. A good example is a virtuosic scene in which Coral Fabre, the fat murderess, leaves a bar-room in which her boyfriend, the equally vicious gigolo, Nicolas Estrella, is doing a tango with one of their victims. Coral is upset that her boyfriend is getting too intimate with their prey and, so, she wanders out of the main room in the hideously squalid tavern, goes down a flight of stairs into an even more horrible basement, finds on the shelf a dusty box of rat poison (remarking to herself that "places like this always have rats"), pours the poison into a rum drink, and, then, goes back upstairs traversing the space that she has just crossed, to slide the toxic cocktail into the outstretched hand of the dowager whom they are going to kill. The shot is extremely complex and elaborate, involving different tones of light and moving the camera up and down a flight of steps, but it "reads" to the viewer as an example of Ripstein's seemingly impoverished cinematic technique -- the poor guy doesn't know how to cut film, slavishly follows the actress through several rooms, and isn't even capable of using any close-ups to emphasize the action; for instance, there's no close-up of the rat poison or the deadly drink or the face of the killer has she mixes the concoction. An audience used to the fluid decoupage in Hollywood films will probably construe this way of shooting the sequence as evidence of Ripstein's primitive aesthetic. In fact, it's the opposite: the way that Ripstein stages scenes in long continuous takes involving complicating tracking and dollying shots is fantastically sophisticated, requiring extraordinarily skillful acting and, probably, vast amounts of rehearsal. But the effect is one of limited means, adding to the general sense of confined hopelessness that the film is intended to induce in viewers.
Coral Fabre is a fat, slovenly nurse. We first see her in a dirty-looking hovel where she offers injections from 7 am to 10 pm at night. She has two children. There's no backstory except the rather bizarre remarks that she makes: she excuses her congenital bad breath as a result of working with corpses in the hospital morgue -- she claims to have inhaled too much formaldehyde. We see her try to seduce an elderly patient after botching his injection, her collection of Charles Boyer photographs, and watch as she writes a letter to a lonely hearts service, setting up a meeting with the gigolo, Nicolas Estrello. Fabre has unfortunate male-pattern balding and suffers from migraines. He's not particularly macho -- he likes knitting while he chats in an avuncular manner with his victims. He comes to Coral's place and is horrified by her two children and the fact that she is overweight. He claims a migraine and leaves -- at first, we think this is a ploy to run away from her, but, in fact, we see him afflicted by migraines later in the film and he probably actually has a headache. He returns later, has sex with Coral, and, then, robs her -- she is awake and sees him stealing her money. Coral tracks down Nicolas and brings her children to live with him. He says that he has too much self-respect to raise another man's children and so Coral promptly drags the kids to an orphanage and, in a disturbing scene (the little girl is sobbing and begging) gets rid of them. Then, she moves back in with Nicolas and tells him that she will assist him in selecting victims to rob. After an abortive attempt to steal from a haughty maiden lady ("single women are too cunning" Coral says, "too observant"), they decide to specialize in lonely widows. Here the film follows Kastle's prototype closely: three women are victimized and killed with an ever-increasing degree of savagery. One woman who is living with a possessive man, meets the couple in a nightmarish tavern in the middle of nowhere -- it's like something out of a David Lynch movie; Coral kills her with rat poison, solicitously advising her not to vomit (she doesn't want her to disgorge the poison.) A pious widow is "married" in a bizarre ceremony in a graveyard. The threesome go to a baseball-themed inn, the Home Run Motel, another hideous place, where Coral ultimately beats the poor widow to death with one of her plaster statues of a saint -- I think it's the evangelist St. Matthew. The killers, then, prey upon a very attractive young widow who is looking for someone to assist her in operating a gas station, also located miles away from anything at all. The widow has a little girl and Nicolas, who has vowed to never touch his victims, has sex with her and even gets her pregnant. When the widow glimpses Nicolas without his toupee (he has proclaimed that he is a monster without the wig), he misunderstands her giggling beats her up, and half drowns the poor woman in waste oil. She demands an abortion and Nicolas summons Coral (who has left the place a few months earlier in a fit of pique) to perform the abortion. First, Nicolas demands that Coral punish him for his infidelity -- she does this by trampling on his hands and, then, using her teeth to rend apart his toupee. Coral then mangles the young woman, causing her to bleed copiously. The woman wanders around in a daze until Nicolas stabs her to death. Then, Coral drowns the little girl in a bathtub -- the room is full of bloody rags. Coral seems to have gone crazy. She holds the child's corpse in her arms and won't let Nicolas take the little body to bury it -- she now reproaches Nicolas for inducing her to abandon her own children. Nicolas buries the bodies but, then, inexplicably calls for the cops. The police come and justice in Northern Sonora is swift and sure. The fat sheriff says that the town is so little that he doesn't even have a jail, apologizing for the fact that he is going to have to handle their case on his own. Coral is kept in an elementary school classroom. (When the charwoman comes into the room, Coral, who is always hungry, asks if she will share her lunch, a single sandwich, with her. Coral then wolfs down the sandwich and remarks: "it's a mistake to share your meal with a fat woman.") Coral puts on her red dress and Nicolas begs the local cops to let him wear his torn toupee. The couple are taken out to dry riverbed and told to run. They stumble away, hand in hand, falling in a hail of bullets into a puddle of stagnant water left between an acre of rocks in the streambed. Before they are killed, Coral has said that their death together seals their common destiny and that "it is the happiest day of (her) life." The film is shot in drab tones of grey and brown -- interiors are various shades of excremental brown, "hemorrhoidal" as Gogol would say, and the swaths of blood (with Cora's red dress) decorating the film are the only deviations from its monochrome palette.
The film differs from Kastle's version in several respects. First, Coral has two children that she abandons to be with the gigolo. (The fat murderess in The Honeymoon Killers had an elderly mother that she put in a nursing home so she could live with her man.) The children are important because, later, Coral blames Nicolas for their miserable fate and this is a point of contention between them. (Coral looks maternal and is shot like a deranged, moronic Madonna -- she has a dull-looking face with glazed eyes and her mouth hangs open.) Kastle alienated the viewer from sympathy with the couple's victims by making them grotesque, racist, and politically unsavory in various ways. Ripstein is far more sympathetic; he doesn't dehumanize the victims, an approach that makes the film even more disturbing. (A scene in which the old religious lady climbs into bed with Nicolas wearing her wedding gown and lasciviously wraps a leg around him is particularly pathetic and indelible.) Ripstein tilts the film toward psychopathology -- the killers don't really seem much concerned about robbing their victims; rather the murders are central to their enterprise, a means in which the two demonstrate their undying devotion to one another. Coral becomes half-crazed when she thinks about her abandoned children and Nicolas is insanely sensitive about his baldness. Kastle's film portrayed the murders as an after-thought to the robbery. In Ripstein's film, the murders are the raison d'etre. Deep Crimson is effectively directed and brilliant enough, but one copy of the damn thing was more than enough for me, and, although I admire the technique, the movie is too unpleasant to be entertaining. Curiously, Ripstein dedicates to "Leonard, Martha and Ray" -- that is, Leonard Kastle and the main characters in The Honeymoon Killers, Martha, the fat nurse, and Ray, the weak but amoral gigolo, in that movie.
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