Perdita Durango

Right after the success of his masterpiece, the dark comedy "El Dia De la Bestia", Spanish director Alex De la Iglesia took a stab at Hollywood with this wild ride of marvelous insanity and bizarre entertainment. Sadly, the resulting movie was severely cut in the U.S. and the U.K. and didn't had the expected results as many labeled as another Tarantino-style film. While at first sight "Perdita Durango" indeed looks like a rip off of the movies by the Tarantino-Rodriguez tandem, this really black comedy is more a witty satire than a serious action flick.

The film is the story of Perdita Durango (Rosie Perez), a young criminal who one night meets Romeo Dolorosa (Javier Bardem), a crazed priest of an extreme form of Santeria who makes a life doing jobs for the mob. They fall in love and Perdita comes along in Romeo's latest job: the traffic of human fetuses for the cosmetic industry. On their trip, they kidnap two American teenagers for Romeo's human sacrifices. However, things go wrong as a DEA agent (James Gandolfini) follows them closely and the kidnapped teens try to escape.

Based on Barry Gifford's novel of the same name, the movie follows the criminal couple's adventure in the style of a road trip movie with the two couples (the criminals and their victims) as main characters. I can't tell how faithful the movie is to the novel, but it is definitely closer to Gifford's previous film adaptation, David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" than to the Tarantino films that are often compared to it. The movie is charged with black humor and disturbing violence, and is a brilliant satire of modern society.

Alex De la Iglesia crafts a film that is at the same time disturbing and funny, and he plays with those two very different emotions with very good results. The pacing of the movie is very good although it is true that at times it feels a bit disjointed. Still, De la Iglesia manages to tell an intelligent and different story than what we are used to. On a side note, the edited A-Pix version is missing what is probably the most important moment of the film due to copyright troubles, so to fully appreciate the film, the 125 version is the way to go.

The acting is good for the most part, with Javier Bardem showing exactly why is he considered the best Spanish actor of his generation; his Romeo Delarosa is one of the best performances of his career. Rosie Perez is effective, but at times it feels as if she weren't up to the challenge, something that hurts the film badly, as she is the main character. Harley Cross and Aimee Graham are very believable as the kidnapped teens and show potential for comedy, but the real joy comes from supporting actors Gandolfini and a surprising Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

Personally, I liked the film a lot and it is a personal favorite, but I must be fair and point out that it is not a perfect film. Alex De la Iglesia's main mistake is to focus too much on Romeo Delarosa's character, almost to the point where Rosie Perez almost becomes a supporting actress. The fact that Bardem's acting is enormously superior doesn't really help Perez' performance. On another point, the movie seems to lose steam at the last point, and while it does recover some of its initial power, the edited versions definitely take out this final improvement.

As written above, this is a personal favorite, and while I wouldn't recommend it to everybody (due to its disturbing images), I would definitely recommend it to fans of black comedies, disturbing thrillers and overall bizarre film-making in general. 8/10

Álex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango (1997) is an outrageously wild and violent road movie that has greater premise than the actual film. The film is based on the Barry Gifford book as was David Lynch's film Wild at Heart (1990), too, and the character Perdita is the lead character in Iglesia's film whereas she had only a small part in Lynch's much more noteworthy film.

Perdita Durango (Rosie Perez) is an attractive and exotic Mexican girl with violent past and future, as we soon learn. She meets mysterious Romeo Dolorosa (Javier Bardem) who practises some strange and bloody voodoo/Satanism rituals and also needs human victims for his acts he performs for and with some cult. They team up, and start their violent journey near the border of Mexico and the USA in order to steal a huge truck carrying loads of human fetuses for some sleazy pedophiliac mafia boss. Yes it sounds very outrageous and once all the characters are introduced the level of wildness reaches its most breathtaking level.

The film is pretty empty in content for sure, unlike David Lynch's film, for example. It has one quite funny bit of commentary about stupid mediocre TV audience that gets its meaning for life through various TV shows and commercialism related to it, and that is exactly the kind of humor that can be found in Iglesia's another outrageous (gore) comedy Acción Mutante (1993). But mostly Perdita Durango seems to concentrate on sudden and rather shocking bursts of violence and steamy sex that will definitely annoy censors throughout the world. There is a silent moment at the end which tells something about what is happening inside the character's head and what she has learnt but still it could have been a whole serious theme for the film. Also the way how the kidnapped couple change in their dangerous situation is quite repulsive as in that world it seems like the more selfish and mean you are the more you will succeed and survive. The young couple is not used as it should have been if Iglesia would have liked to include some serious and dramatic elements to the film and characters and thus make a more noteworthy piece of powerful film.

The other characters are also very nasty and perverse, completely unable to control their violent and sexual instincts, but they are also quite blackly humorous (the mafia boss, the two FBI agents etc.) and so the tone of the film is not too serious at all. Most of the characters are just animals in the burning heat of the border trying to exploit and survive from each other. Romeo's character is definitely as wicked as they come but still he is far from the effect of Willem Dafoe in Lynch's film, where the character was the other side of human nature, whereas Igleasia never seems to be interested in depicting things so deep in this film. His characters are just bad, violent, miserable and selfish scumbags and there are not too many, or any, normal and safe feeling individuals in the film. The FBI caricature played by a film maker Alex Cox (Repo Man) is quite funny and makes fun on all the serious agent characters of the cinematic history.

The film is far from the greatness of Iglesia's wonderful El Dia de la Bestia aka The Day of the Beast (1995) with its philosophic elements and incredible atmosphere with great visuality. Perdita hasn't got any genuinely interesting and inventive camerawork or cinematic magic and even the rites Romeo commits are not as chilling as in, for example, Wes Craven's Serpent and the Rainbow (1987). The soundtrack by Simon Boswell is mediocre, nothing too special in my opinion even though the director praises his work for this film and in general very much. He is a talented composer but his soundtrack for this film is not so memorable.

I saw the most uncut (minus one 3 seconds image of the mafia boss slapping the face of a little girl, still this brief image is in the Spanish festival print) version released on DVD in Germany, and as far as I know, the Spanish tape is like this DVD, too. But all the other versions released, like the Hong Kong, UK, US, Swedish, Finnish and so on versions on VHS and DVD are severely cut for sex, violence and drug use. The "uncut" version I saw is quite strong at times and includes some scenes of extreme and vicious violence that are also more or less gratuitous to say the least, as well as the numerous sex scenes, but they definitely tell something about the brute instincts of the characters as mentioned. Overall the humor in this film is very black and just plain sick and that comes clear at least with the numerous car crash deaths in the film, so Iglesia is definitely not depicting his characters too heroic or lucky in their ways of life!

Perdita Durango is not deep or meaningful film enough but the ending saves the film from even greater failure. Many will find this entertaining as it has graphic violence, "cool" characters, sex and other forbidden taboos on screen, but if one is looking for a film that has something to say and really concentrate on it so that we can call it a theme, then Perdita Durango is not among the best. Still it could have been so much worse, with bad and stupid actors and characters and boring segments: now it runs 124 PAL minutes but never really feels boring or too long so Iglesia's way to tell the story and cut all the unnecessary parts off is present here. He definitely is a talented director but manages to achieve more than 6/10, too.

As one Argentine critic said: "You love it or you hate it" -he rated the movie with an excellent-. I really love it and it´s because there aren´t so many movies such as this. Perdita Durango hasn´t a great plot, but this film really didn´t need it. It doesn´t matter if a scene has nothing to do with the plot, because this film doesn´t care about it. You have to be open-minded to watch it, with not so many expectatives about it, and you will like it very much. Remember that Perdita Durango wasn´t an expensive film. It has very hilarious parts, some gore ones (not so much), action, sex, deaths and some controversial themes and quotes. A nice bundle of things that I personally like in movies. The movie reminds me of some movies such as "Doom generation" and some parts of "From dawn till dusk".

I rate Perdita Durango with a 7 out of 10.

I saw six movies in three days at my first Toronto Film Festival -- this one last, after a slow-moving Japanese film, "Afterlife" (which I also enjoyed, and the pace of which set up this film wonderfully). I saw this uncut and on the big screen, and it shot right through my veins like an amphetamine from a slingshot. Javier Bardem is one of those rare actors who is so good, who disappears so far into his roles, that a lot of people still don't know him. Pity -- he's the pivot of this film, the steady-burning sun around which equally dazzling Rosie Perez throbs in her mad ecliptic orbit. The acting is, in fact -- in spite of what you're reading elsewhere here -- perfectly pitched in all quarters. I managed to get an uncut video copy online a few years back from ebay, and it IS true, the movie loses a bit in the translation from big-screen to small, but trust me, it's still a wild ride. I left the theater feeling like I'd been set on fire with gasoline and Vaseline.

I stumbled into this film while channel surfing the other night and couldn't turn it off. There's something compelling about the performances of Javier Bardem and Rosie Perez that transform this film from what could have been a mediocre exploitation film to something well worth watching. There's a lot of original thinking here and luckily the director and editor got the mix just right to pull of a real gem. There is a mix of comedy, romance, evil, pathos and irony blended in a way to keep you off balance and always wondering what's around the next corner (what's with the fetuses?). 7 out of 10.