El imperio de la fortuna
Mexico,
1986, 132 min
Shown in 1987 / 1999
CREDITS
- dir
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Arturo Ripstein
- prod
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Hector López
- scr
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Paz Alicia Garcíadiego
- cam
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Angel Goded
- editor
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Carlos Savage
- cast
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Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Blanca Guerra, Alejandro Parodi, Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez, Margarita Sanz, Ernesto Yáñez
- source
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IMCINE, Tepic #40, Mexico D.F, Mexico City, 06760 Mexico. FAX: 525-564-4187
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COMMENTS
Arturo Ripstein appeared in person as the 1999 recipient of the Akira Kurosawa Award. Paz Alicia Garcíadiego also appeared.
OTHER
Despite a withered hand and crippling poverty, Dionisio Pinzon rises within the life-and-death world of cockfighting to fame, fortune and beautiful women—at least for a while. Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein revisits Juan Rulfo’s classic tale The Golden Rooster (El gallo de Oro)—first adapted for the big screen in 1968 by Carlos Fuentes and Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez—to create an allegorical tale about the uprooting of tradition and the loss of values that accompany the harshness of Mexico’s economic realities. Ripstein’s tale focuses on the spiritual flaw in the aptly named Dionisio—the greed that leads him to lose everything he has gained, to destroy himself and his family, when he turns his back on simple goodness. By chance and virtue he escaped his ignoble existence, by gambling he finds himself cast down again. In part an homage to Buñuel’s work in Mexico with its blend of the real and the surreal, the scenes of tawdry smoke-filled tents and sun-rippled cornfields give an unnervingly discordant feel to a life misspent. This is life on the edge of fighting, gambling and sex—in a profound and powerful drama.
FACTOID #147
The Coppola clan (Francis, Eleanor, Sofia and Roman) is the family with the most filmmakers represented at the Festival. Films screened include Apocalypse Now (1990); One from the Heart (1990); Lick the Star (1998); The Virgin Suicides (2000); CQ (2002); and On the Set of CQ (2002). (And that’s not even counting onscreen appearances by cousins Nic Cage and Jason Schwartzman.)
