La virgen de la lujuria
Mexico / Spain / Portugal,
2002, 140 min
Shown in 2003
CREDITS
- dir
-
Arturo Ripstein
- prod
-
Mate Cantero, Alvaro Garnica
- scr
-
Paz Alicia Garcíadiego
- cam
-
Esteban de Llaca
- editor
-
Fernando Pardo
- mus
-
Leoncio Lara
- cast
-
Ariadna Gil, Luís Felipe Tovar, Juan Diego, Patricia Reyes Spíndola
- source
-
Mate Production, José Abascal 44, 1°D, Madrid 28003, Spain. FAX: 34-91-441-5899. EMAIL: pablo@mateproduction.com.
-
COMMENTS
Arturo Ripstein, Paz Alicia Garcíadiego in person.
OTHER
Mexican director Arturo Ripstein and his collaborator Paz Alicia Garcíadiego are cinema’s foremost chroniclers of sexual obsession and society’s illicit desires, their narrative absurdities and rigorously composed imagery taking over from where Luis Buñuel left off. The Virgin of Lust finds them at the top of their game, expanding a tale of one masochist’s obsession with a beautiful woman into an entire universe of perversities and pornographies, where masochism and sadism are merely reflections of the culture that surrounds them. Nacho is a waiter in 1940s Veracruz, riding out his boring days by listening to operas or furtively masturbating. The arrival of Lola, a lusty, opium-addicted Spanish “actress” as aggressive as Nacho is passive, certainly livens up his empty life, especially after she allows him such delights as licking coffee off her glove. That’s as far as Nacho may get, alas—Lola really wants a hulking wrestler named Gardenia to give her more than a coffee-licking—but the arrival of a group of embittered Spaniards fleeing Franco gives him a new distraction. Channeling his thwarted sexual desires into a far more acceptable milieu for such attributes (politics), Nacho exchanges one form of role-playing for another, with Ripstein acidly connecting his escalating delusions to those of a world just as obsessed, and just as repressed.
—Jason Sanders
FACTOID #162
The Stand-In (1985), Nina Takes a Lover (1994), Dream for an Insomniac (1996), Dream with the Fishes (1997), Teknolust (2002) and Dopamine(2003) were not only screened at Festival but were also shot in San Francisco.
