Deep Crimson (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Miguel Necoechea and Pablo Barbachano; directed by Arturo Ripstein; written by Paz Alicia Garciediego; cinematography by Guillermo Granillo; edited by Rafael Castanedo; music by David Mansfield; starring Regina Orozco, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Sherlyn González, Giovanni Florido, Julieta Egurrola, Marisa Paredes, Rosa Furman, Verónica Merchant, and Bianca Florido. 4K + Blu-ray or Blu-ray, color, 136 min., 1996. A Criterion Collection release.

True crime is one of today’s most fashionable genres, and it’s been a winner at the movies since the early days of cinema, attracting many a gifted auteur, among whom the towering Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein ranks with the finest. His searing Deep Crimson, released in 1996, is now available in a new 4K/Blu-ray edition from the Criterion Collection, complete with video extras presenting the eminently quotable insights of both Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego, his screenwriter, wife, and longtime accomplice. The movie is a rich example of their artistry and a splendid specimen of the modern melodrama at its most harrowing. At once romantic, compassionate, and grim, it’s a singular experience and a disturbing one.

It’s also a refreshing instance of a remake that outdoes the original. The Honeymoon Killers, the only film written and directed by music professor and opera composer Leonard Kastle, premiered in 1970, did so-so business, and garnered favorable reviews from discerning critics. Its downbeat story is based on the real-life case of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, known in the tabloids as the Lonely Hearts Killers, a felonious couple who died in the electric chair at Sing-Sing after committing several murders in the late Forties; their modus operandi was to pose as siblings and lure lonely victims through personal ads in the papers. Kastle related their history in an appropriately low-rent style, using grungy black-and-white cinematography and shooting his relatively unfamiliar stars, Tony Lo Bianco and Shirley Stoler, in flatly unglamorous settings. Ripstein saw the film and loved it, explaining on the Criterion disc that the subject appealed to his perennial interest in “themes of sordidness, both physical and emotional,” and to his fondness for characters at the end of their rope, who have “a certain beauty, a certain poetry.”

Kastle’s movie was some twenty-five years old and largely forgotten when Ripstein encountered it, so he saw no reason not to retell the story in his own terms, echoing it without duplicating it. Like the original, his picture is a classic dissection of “mad love,” which he defines (in a panel discussion on the Criterion disc) as “love above and beyond any barrier or any moral or other issues,” revealing “humanity in its rawest essence.” Garciadiego says much the same in a video interview. “Ripstein and I like losers, characters at the edge, on the brink,” she says. Coral (Regina Orozco) and Nicolás (Daniel Giménez Cacho), the antiheroes of Deep Crimson, are exactly such losers, perceiving themselves as freaks and outcasts for sadly banal reasons: Coral (Regina Orozco) is heavy, ungainly, and a poor mother; Nicolás (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is bald, insecure, and an untalented con artist. With their unhappy self-images they are “outsiders in the romantic world,” Garciadiego says, “and making them the main point of a romantic film, a love movie, was a challenge we couldn’t pass up.”

Deep Crimson is as much a horror movie as a love movie, and Criterion has aptly recruited horror specialist Ari Aster to provide a video introduction. For him Ripstein is a great practitioner of tremendismo, a literary mode marked by “extreme, crude realism and a sensationalistic, perverse interest in violence and suffering,” in Aster’s words. That pretty well describes Deep Crimson, which Aster likens to such morbid forerunners as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughten, 1986) and Man Bites Dog (Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoȋt Poelvoorde, 1992). In what’s evidently intended as a compliment, Aster says there’s a “soul sickness” in Ripstein’s work, adding that his films would “probably be unbearable” if not for their occasional touches of pitch-black humor. Mordant comedy is indeed important to the tone Ripstein and Garciadiego seek—it contributes “a rhythm like the waves in the sea,” Garciadiego says—but comic irony is never a primary concern for these highly serious artists. In my 2000 interview with them, Ripstein said “entertainment” is a “crass idea” and even an “obscenity” for him; his goals are deeper and darker than audience-pleasing concepts like “entertainment” and “humor” can contain.

Ripstein originally hoped to make Deep Crimson in the United States, where the events of the actual case transpired. The realities of financing led to a Mexican production, however, and this brought a couple of new considerations to the fore, both connected with cultural differences between the two countries. The killers prey on lonesome, isolated women who respond to lonely-hearts ads in hopes of finding romance or at least some meaningful human contact, and while this situation is not uncommon in America, it’s harder to find in Mexico, where the closeness of extended families makes chronic isolation comparatively rare. Ripstein addressed this by shooting the film in northern Mexico, where the population is scattered and many people live far from neighbors and relatives. Further emphasizing the separation of the story’s victims from society at large, the filmmakers give most of them non-Mexican ethnicities, and one of them visits with a Jewish neighbor (a sly self-reference by Ripstein, who appreciates the contrast between his Jewish identity and Garciadiego’s background as a child educated by nuns). A second problem was the fact that the protagonists are caught and executed in the end, and capital punishment is exceedingly rare in the Mexican justice system. The filmmakers solved this by bringing in the extrajudicial expediency known as ley fuga, whereby inconvenient prisoners are provoked into fleeing and gunned down to prevent escape. This twist greatly enhanced the finale, says Garciadiego, who regards the deaths of Coral and Nicolás as “beautiful, because they’re killed together. That’s the final gift that a story of crazy love needs…. It’s like a gift from God.”

Stylistically, there isn’t a great deal of crimson in Deep Crimson, although blood does flow at times, most extravagantly when a brutal stabbing and a gory abortion take place. Ripstein has always been fond of black-and-white photography, and while commercial considerations have generally precluded this, his handling of color, here abetted by Guillermo Granillo’s excellent cinematography, tends to be subdued. He also prefers keeping music to a minimum, for aesthetic reasons (his treasured friend and mentor Luis Buñuel had the same bias) and because he confesses to being “musically illiterate,” although he collaborated well with David Mansfield on the Deep Crimson score, whistling his suggestions by telephone to the US-based composer. As for the camera, which he calls his “partner in crime,” he has always been drawn to the long, fluid takes that give Deep Crimson much of its allure. “I really like continuity,” he says on the Criterion disc. “I prefer smooth flow over roughness. Cuts are rough. In a way, they have edges.… I would love to have a camera with wings.” Composition is as crucial as camera movement and editing, and Ripstein is an expert at integrating all three factors. “The frame is cinema,” he declares. “And if the frame doesn’t end, if it encompasses everything, then all the better. Because life is a long sequence shot.”

Aiming at similar effects, Garciadiego writes dialogue meant to be as flowing and seamless as Ripstein’s long takes, using repetition and the sounds of words to create insistent moods. “Spanish is a very baroque language,” she says. “We go, we come back, we repeat, we emphasize…so that’s the way my characters talk.” Her screenplays are also minutely detailed, full of background information—what a character is thinking or noticing or even smelling—that doesn’t appear explicitly on the screen. It’s an unorthodox technique but an effective one, and when writing Deep Crimson she took particular pleasure in describing the dingy milieus where most of the action takes place. “The image saturated with objects fills the screen so much more beautifully than a tidy middle-class home,” she says. “The lower class is much more photogenic than the middle class.”

The full 136-minute cut of Deep Crimson took a long time to reach the screen. When the initial editing was completed one of the producers demanded trims to keep the running time under two hours, and then the morality police went to work on it, eliminating the most violent footage and softening harsh scenes—most notably the abortion and the child murder following it—almost out of existence. The result was a theatrical version more than twenty minutes shorter than the full-length version, and many years passed before the deleted material was finally restored. Ripstein says he took advantage of the restoration to make the director’s cut more intense than ever, in “revenge” for the censorship; that said, the expurgated version isn’t without merit—it’s tamer but also tighter—and I wish Criterion’s package included it along with the restored edition. Comparing the two versions (the shorter one is streaming on the Criterion Channel at the time I write) is an interesting exercise, although I agree with Haden Guest’s program essay that the deletions diminish the “corporeal intensity” that reaches its peak in the last act.

Discussing his overall approach, Ripstein acknowledges his deep debt to Buñuel and to the German expressionist visuals of Josef von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, and F.W. Murnau, which “dazzled” him when he was discovering cinema. “We tend to repeat the things we’re obsessively drawn to,” he says. “Stealing in art isn’t unusual…. You don’t create from nothing. Everything comes from things buried deep in your eyes or your gut, and what was buried in my eyes I tried to reproduce…while trying to conceal the plagiarism or theft.” His goal is to communicate the “emotional obsessions” at the core of his artistic personality. “Directing is a pathology,” he says with startling candor. Fortunately for us in the audience, it’s a productive and constructive pathology. Deep Crimson embodies its most stirring possibilities.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 4