DEEP CRIMSON (PROFUNDO CARMESI) (director: Arturo Ripstein; screenwriter: Alicia Paz Garciadiego; cinematographer: Guillermo Granillo; cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho (Nicolas Estrella), Regina Orozco (Coral Fabre), Marisa Paredes (Irene Gallardo), Julieta Egurrola (Juanita Norton), Rosa Furman (Mrs. Silberman), Veronica Merchant (Rebeca Sampedro), Patricia Reyes Espindola (Mrs. Ruelas), 1996-Mex.)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A very troubling film, regarding the crimes of Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, who were executed in 1951. This Mexican version is a re-working of The Honeymoon Killers (69) and is set in the Mexico of 1949. It offers a vivid picture of greed, vanity, and pure evil. This film differs from the former in its more gaudy and cartoonish style and careful camerawork taking note of the reflecting light patterns that surrounded the couple, and with a penchant for showing the troubled characters gazing into mirrors, as if they were looking for their lost souls. The grim nature of its story was made less austere by the film's black comedy, which was a staple of both films. As diabolical as this film was, in showing the couple to be moral degenerates with no conscience or redeeming qualities, the earlier film, the one I still prefer, takes a slightly different emphasis, holding a more cult-like look at the grotesque couple, while also showing them to be heartless weirdos without any redeeming qualities.
Coral (Regina Orozco) is overweight and suffers from halitosis. She is a nurse and a part-time embalmer whose search for her own Charles Boyer ends when she meets gigolo-confidence man Nicolas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) through a lonely heart ad she responds to. This is match made in hell. He poses as a native born Spaniard and a gentleman, who sleeps with her at her urgings, and awakens from this bed of bliss to rob her, which she sees but says nothing. She tracks him down with her two small children in tow the next day and declares he is the man she always wanted and will do anything for him. She even tells him, while she is waiting in his apartment the next day for him to return, that she read all his letters and knows that he is an extortionist and murdered one widow by giving her an overdose of medication. When he waivers at her proposal to live together, she takes the children the same day and dumps them in an orphanage, saying she would rather have him than them. She tells him that she would rather kill herself than not have him. This pleases the egocentric gigolo, who suffers from severe migraines. He realizes that this could work out for him, that she will never betray him.
The most important thing in Nico's life is to look good. His most important possession is his hairpiece, as he is ashamed of his baldness and spends long periods of time in front of the mirror adjusting the wig and his fedora hat with the brim turned down. There is one point in the story where he loses his hairpiece and he falls apart, until she comes to the recue and has one made up with her hair.To say that this cowardly couple has some psychological problems, is to say a mouthful.
The two team up, presenting themselves as brother and sister, as they go on a long string of crimes together. Their first big job together, they answer a lonely heart ad from a widow named Juanita (Egurrola). Things go wrong when they meet her in a remote lounge and she tells him she is penniless, living with a jealous lover and having to sneak out to meet him. When the two start dancing romantically together, things go bizarre, as the obese Coral has a jealousy tantrum and spikes the widow's drink with rat poison, which kills her. So now their crime spree is not only over greed but resorts to murder because of jealousy, and the gigolo becomes her murder accomplice.
Their next victim is a lonely widow, Irene (Marisa). They convince her to go along with them on a Christian crusade. Her anarchist, Jewish neighbor (Furman) recognizes these two as charlatans and tries to warn her friend, but to no avail. She is so desperate for a man in her bed, that she runs off with the two and gets married in a cemetery. When they check into a motel and she wants to sleep with her husband, the jealous Coral cracks a statue over her head, and that takes care of another widow. Her arrangement with Nico, is that he doesn't sleep with anyone but her.
Their last murder is their most horrid and sloppiest one, as they answer a personal ad from a widow (Espindola) in a backwater town, who wants to meet a mechanic and will marry him after a two month courtship is proved to be satisfactory to her. She turns out to be a young woman with a young daughter, and is very sexually aggressive with Nico. She demands that his sister leaves, which she does, but soon returns on Nico's request that he needs her, that he is having migraines and that the widow is pregnant. The cowardly couple have no qualms killing both the mother and daughter, and it only through betrayal by one of them that the cops are called.
In their execution the next day, the police gun them down like dogs in the field, and the vain Nico only begs to be shot with his wig on. He doesn't want to die in front of Coral without it on. I think that little touch of vanity got weary after a while, and the director just made too much of it. It lost its humorous quality by then in the story.
Nevertheless, this is a chilling tale by one of Mexico's most respected director, who left no room for sympathizing over these two twisted lovers, swindlers, and killers. The director caught the slimy couple's depravity full-blast and never let up on them. To watch Coral put the widow's young child in a bath and wantonly kill her, while at the same time mothering her, was a ghastly sight to see.
REVIEWED ON 11/28/99 GRADE: B-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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