El castillo de la pureza

Could be better. True history but missing the point. A good book, not a good movie

Hard to watch but a good movie nevertheless. Not an enjoyable movie but every cinephile would be glad to watch it. Acting is great, Claudio Brook gives an acting performance for the ages, he is one of the most evil characters i have watched recently, and it's not just that, i mean it's easy to play a villain but it's difficult to play a character that he doesn't even realise how evil he is. A menacing hypocrite, breaking down the soul and the courage of his family, convincing them that everything he does, he does for their own good. Of course, Rita Macedo's character is a villain as well, letting her husband hurting her children.

Not much to say, it's heartbreaking and devastating but it's a piece of Art simultaneously. I can't rate it higher and maybe i am being unfair giving this rating, but i didn't love it, so a 7/10 is all i can give. In any case, i urge every person who love quality movies, to watch it.

Though recently in the Mexican movies we see basically the same kind of things like crossed stories or extremely "realistic" ones, or both, there are some things in the old ones that the new ones are forgetting: beauty. This movie is based in a true story where a man that is afraid to contaminate his family with the evils of the world (and actually he is already "contaminated", and very), decides to lock them inside their house for years, avoiding them any kind of contact with the world, even throw the windows. Not happy just with this, he makes the kids work in the family business that is making poison to kill rats. The characters are confocal created, ambiguous and confused, such as anybody is, and themes like loneliness or sexual curiosity in the kids while they are growing up is very well managed. However, even it is a sad story, it is so well treated, that it is beautiful. This is a movie that I would certainly recommend, specially because Mexican movies has not good fame.

Cinema and painting are different forms of art. While the former is a mode of telling stories, it can be said that the latter is a form of visually representing those stories. For an astute viewer, true cinematographic art is created when a film director is able to merge both these forms of art. It is with Castle of Purity/"El Castillo de la Pureza" that Mexican cinema auteur Arturo Ripstein has directed a film wherein one sees cinema being portrayed on a big screen as an art form. It can be said that through this film he has depicted that in some ways a director can also be a small scale painter. He has made great use of closed spaces and nature as each frame, each shot bears the mark of an accomplished painter. His film is about a strict yet hypocrite disciplinarian who would go to any length in order to enforce discipline. Sensible viewers would be able to relate to the film's theme as it is quite possible for people to find a cruel misanthrope in their midst. It is not a daily occurrence that one gets to see a film whose protagonist likens human beings to rats. Mexican actors Claudio Brook and Rita Macedo play important roles in this film. In 1995, on the occasion of 100 years of cinema, Variety International Film Guide asked its national correspondents to list their country's top 10 films. The name of Mexican film Castle of Purity "El Castillo de la Pureza" appeared in that important list. It has been universally hailed as the film which got its author Arturo Ripstein immense critical acclaim. Film critic Lalit Rao watched this film during 14th International Film Festival of Kerala 2009 at Trivandrum,India where a retrospective of Arturo Ripstein's films was organized.

It's a sensational true crime story that tells itself. The seriously disturbed patriarch of a family decides to keep his wife and chyldren locked up eternally for the purposes of protecting them from a cruel and sexually deviant outside world. And this is perhaps the greatest depth to which the movie aspires, with the head of this family clearly shown to have a severely dysfunctional obsession with sexual matters throughout the run of the film.

Aside from that, it wisely sticks to the real life story it was based on very closely. The chyldren live together in solitude making products which the father goes out to sell. We see the punishments they have to endure, the bizarre educational system imposed on them, and their thirst for sexual stimulation and novelty that naturally increases uncontrollably in the adolescents.

Through the simple telling of the real story we can ponder the important philosophical questions. For example, why is dictatorship wrong? Because you might get a crazy and not a benevolent dictator who takes you down a completely skewed and unhealthy path. How far are people willing to go to excuse the behavior of a bad family member? What happens when you do your utmost to supress natural urges?

Beyond the obvious interest of the story, the plot is too simplistic to go much further. We see glimpses of how attached the chyldren are to their father despite all he's done and the madness of said father, but nothing is extremely well fleshed out. If you simply take it as a dramatisation of a crime story and use it as food for thought, though, it does its job well.

Honourable Mentions: The Girl Next Door (2007). A dramatisation of the real life murder of Sylvia Likens, who was tortured to death by her caretaker, a woman who was also obsessed with sexual issues of some sort. A good film with the same essence as this one although it changes up more details of the case than Pureza, which is a pretty direct adaptation of the story.