Arturo Ripstein is one of the most respected veteran filmmakers of México. He belongs to the generation responsible for the so-called "new Mexican cinema" in the 1970s, that produced some remarkable works, as Paul Leduc's «Reed, México insurgente» and Felipe Cazals' «Canoa». Ripstein was one of the first to gain recognition with his very good B&W revisionist western «Tiempo de morir» (1965), written directly for the screen by Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. It rained a lot between this movie and his 1999 screen version of García Márquez's novel «El coronel no tiene quien le escriba». In the meantime, he married screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego, and since their first collaboration, «El imperio de la fortuna» (1986, from Juan Rulfo's tale «El gallo de oro»), Ripstein's cinematic world has become overblown, slow, morbid, grotesque and misanthropic.
One cannot completely blame Garciadiego for this, but she surely has a lot to do with it. «Profundo carmesí» (1996), their retelling of the story told in «The Honeymoon Killers,» is a good example of this couple's peculiar collaborations. In «La perdición de los hombres», they once again enter the world of misery, though the characters are not precisely outcasts as the fat nurse and her gigolo lover in «Profundo carmesí». This time Ripstein returns to his early free-style -it's even in black and white-, as he tells the stories of normal people, who choose weird solutions to their predicaments and whose dreams occupy the same space and tone as their daily actions on the screen. Garciadiego rarely paints a "nice" male character, so here we find not only one but three machos, who play baseball and believe that man's downfall is personified in women (in fact, the movie's title is a verse from a popular ranchera that goes "The ruination of men / Are the damned women"). Garciadiego built her story "a la Pulp Fiction", with the first act seen after we have witnessed the resolution, so the interest is substained as we wait to know why two of the guys kill the man known as the "King of the Baseball Diamond", while his widow fights for his dead body with his younger and prettier lover.
I cannot deny it is funny. Sometimes very funny, mainly because Patricia Reyes Spíndola (as Axe Face, the widow, an underrated fine actress that Ripstein turned into a star when she played lesbian singer Lucha Reyes in his sordid 1994 biopic «La reina de la noche») is such a great performer, that she carries along most of the film. On the other hand, Ripstein uses long takes by two virtuoso cameramen who follow the players dynamically in the tightest spaces. For me, who dislikes a few Ripstein/Garciadiego films («La reina...», «Así es la vida», «Principio y fin», «El evangelio de las maravillas») and avoided «El coronel...», this was a sort of reconciliation with their cinema.
