Perdita Durango

Perdita Durango (1997) is a fascinating oddity in the filmography of Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia. It was his attempt at breaking into the North American market with a cast that featured recognizable actors like Rosie Perez, Javier Bardem and James Gandolfini. Unfortunately, De La Iglesia’s film came out before Bardem became known to audiences here and two years before Gandolfini hit it big with The Sopranos. As a result, Perdita Durango was trimmed by ten minutes and dumped into direct-to-video hell with the generic title Dance with the Devil. Even in this neutered form, De La Igleisia’s film is a gonzo potpourri of wild sex, crazed violence and pitch black humor. In other words, the stuff that instant cult films are made of.

Based on Barry Gifford’s novel 59 Degrees and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango, De La Iglesia’s film is a spin-off, of sorts, of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) – also an adaptation of one of Gifford’s novels – by focusing on one of the minor characters featured in that film (and played by Isabella Rossellini). Perdita (Perez) is a tough, no-nonsense lady clad in a Tura Satana-style black outfit. She meets Romeo Dolorosa (Bardem), a maniacal criminal who also happens to be an even more maniacal witch doctor.

The couple cross the border into Mexico, become lovers and partners in crime as they kidnap a white-bread couple of teens – Duane (Harley Cross) and Estelle (Aimee Graham) and transport a truckload of human fetuses to Las Vegas while trying to evade determined Drug Enforcement Agency officer Woody Dumas (Gandolfini).

The opening scene, where a schlubby guy tries to pick up Perdita at an airport, tells us all we need to know about her – she’s smart, tough and more than capable of handling herself, sending the hapless guy scurrying with a few choice words. It’s a juicy role that Rosie Perez sinks her teeth into, immersing herself fully. She shows a wide range of emotions as her character is more than an amoral criminal, she also conveys a vulnerability – albeit fleeting – that gives her a bit more depth than one would expect from this kind of a film.

Romeo is an impulsive mad man as evident in a flashback where he forces a busty bank teller to expose her naked breast while he’s robbing the bank! He then double-crosses his partner, hitting him with the getaway vehicle. Much like Perez, Javier Bardem commits fully to the role with scary intensity. Romeo is a force of nature that follows his own beliefs that are a funky fusion of a love for cinema and a twisted belief in Santeria.

James Gandolfini portrays Woody as a slightly sleazy, slightly seedy character that speaks with a slightly weasely lisp and has the misfortune of being repeatedly hit by fast moving vehicles, not unlike a live-action Wile E. Coyote. He also seems to be mildly fixated on Ava Gardner, at one point remarking how much he likes her lips. He’s determined to bring down Romeo for his outstanding drug offenses and will let nothing get in his way. It becomes a point of pride for him. Gandolfini steals every scene he’s in with his I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude and that is saying something in a film that features larger than life characters played by Rosie Perez, Javier Bardem, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

The film is at its most horrific in the scenes where Romeo practices voodoo. In one ritualistic scene, he drenches himself in blood and smothers his face in a bag of cocaine. He then hacks limbs off of a corpse, tears out its heart and writhes around on the ground, channeling multitudes of demons. There is an unpredictable energy to the scene that makes it scary and thrilling. De la Iglesia contrasts these scenes with gallows humour. Romeo may be a vicious killer but he also loves the music of Herb Albert. There is a hilarious moment where he and Perdita happily groove to the strains of The Dating Game theme.

From the grotesque mutants who threaten Earth in Accion Mutante (1993) to the graphic voodoo practices in Perdita Durango, horrific, often bizarre, imagery has always been prominent in Alex de la Iglesia’s movies. Like his cinematic contemporaries — Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro and France’s Christophe Gans — De la Iglesia impishly mixes a variety of genres in his films:

“I like to play with genres and construct my own movies...What I am trying to do is inject poison into these genres. In a happy comedy I like to introduce poison and make the movie freaky and weird, with a tasteless sense of humor.”

It is no surprise that, like Del Toro and Gans, De la Iglesia comes from a comic book/fanzine background that informs all of his work. There is something of the film geek in all of three filmmakers that results in a desire to include show-stopping spectacle set pieces in their movies and to quote other films in their own work, fueled by an obsession with American culture.

El Dia de la bestia was a huge hit in its native country, earning six Goya Awards (Spain’s equivalent of the Academy Awards), and breaking box office records. Producer Andres Vicente Gomez saw the movie and wanted De la Iglesia to direct Perdita Durango. Gomez felt that De la Iglesia’s sensibilities were better suited for the project than current director, Bigas Luna. With pre-production already underway, De la Iglesia came aboard and molded the material to fit his preoccupations.

For all of its inspired lunacy, Perdita Durango is not without its poignant moments, like when Romeo waxes nostalgic about seeing Vera Cruz (1954) at an impressionable age and how the fate of Burt Lancaster’s character resonated with him. Like with that film, there is a certain sense of fatalism in Perdita Durango as Romeo knows he’s going to die but goes through with one last job anyway and De La Iglesia literally has him become Lancaster’s character, mimicking the showdown in Vera Cruz with the one between Romeo and his cousin Reggie (Carlos Bardem). Perdita Durango ends on a deliciously subversive note as the titular character walks through a gaudy Vegas casino with “Winner” signs flashing all around her – epitomizing the American dream – but she’s lost everything.

Perdita Durango is a curious oddity in De la Iglesia’s oeuvre. It is his most overt attempt to crack the North American market (where he has only a small but dedicated following) with his first English-speaking film and a cast of recognizable actors like Rosie Perez, James Gandolfini and Javier Bardem. This alienated his Spanish fans who probably felt he had sold out, while his perchance for graphic sex and violence scared off potential distributors and mainstream audiences in North America, sending the film direct to video. This reaction is unfortunate because Perdita Durango is De la Iglesia’s most successful effort: a perfect mix of the ridiculous and the epic, with the right blend of genres (crime, horror, comedy, road trip) and a wonderfully eclectic cast that features his regular favorites (Santiago Segura) and colorful character actors (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins).

To the Wonder

With The Tree of Life (2011), filmmaker Terrence Malick not only fully embraced non-linear storytelling but also made a semi-autobiographical film as it was partially inspired by his experiences growing up in Central Texas. The famously secretive filmmaker followed this film with To the Wonder (2012), which is loosely based on his second marriage to a Parisian whom he met in France during a lengthy self-imposed exile from filmmaking. She had a young daughter and soon the three of them moved to Austin, Texas. She tried to adapt to her new surroundings while he would leave them for long periods of time without explanation. This film uses these scant known autobiographical details as a loose structure for Malick to push the style he utilized so brilliantly in The Tree of Life to further extremes.

We meet the happy couple frolicking in Paris and very much in love. Neil (Ben Affleck) is an American traveling through Europe and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) is a Ukrainian divorcee with a ten-year-old daughter (Tatiana Chiline). Malick’s restless camera hovers close to the lovers conveying a believable intimacy between them while also marveling at the world around them – most impressively Mont St. Michel, the island abbey located off the coast of Normandy. It is a breathtaking combination of ancient architecture and expansive vistas of a beach at low tide that seems to go on forever.

At times it feels like we are intruding on these people’s most personal moments and privy to their innermost thoughts thanks to Marina’s voiceover musings. She shares her feelings for Neil: “I’ll go wherever you go,” and what she tells him: “If I left you because you didn’t want to marry me, it would mean I didn’t love you. I don’t expect anything. Just to go a little of our way together.” It is a refreshingly honest and candid expression of her feelings for him.

The couple is soon relocated to his hometown in Oklahoma and Malick manages to find visual splendor in suburbia. Olga Kurylenko is a revelation in these early scenes. Not only does Malick’s camera love her but she acts naturally in his very intimate and Expressionistic style. She also does a great job conveying Marina’s emotional fearlessness – a willingness to be honest with her feelings towards the man she loves. Marina is the kind of beautiful free spirit Malick loves to populate his films, from the childlike Holly in Badlands (1973) to Abby in Days of Heaven (1978).

Initially, Ben Affleck seems like an odd choice to star in a Malick film as his mannered style of acting would seem at odds with the filmmaker’s loose, improvisational approach. Early on, in the Europe scenes the actor comes off as a little stiff but there is definitely chemistry between him and Kurylenko, which only deepens when they go stateside. As the film progresses and Neil becomes more distant from Marina, it makes more sense why Malick cast Affleck. Like the equally mannered Richard Gere in Days of Heaven, Affleck portrays a man unable to fully embrace the little moments in life that most of us take for granted but that populate Malick’s films. Affleck is excellent at playing controlled, emotionally detached characters and so when Neil begins freezing Marina out, the actor is at his finest.

Javier Bardem appears as a Catholic priest struggling with his faith. Malick depicts him as a somber, solitary figure and this is conveyed in the poignant visual of the actor walking down a deserted tree-lined street with leaves strewn on the ground. This understated image tells us so much about the character and is further reinforced by his voiceover thoughts. Even when walking among the happy attendees of a wedding ceremony he just presided over, he looks lonely, unable to connect with anyone except on a surface level. He confesses, via voiceover, that he’s going through the motions.

Eventually, Neil and Marina drift apart and she and her child return to Europe. Some time passes and he reconnects with a childhood friend named Jane (Rachel McAdams) who is coming off a failed relationship of her own. They fall in love, sharing a similar temperament. As he did with Neil and Marina’s courtship, Malick captures the intimacy of Neil and Jane’s embryonic love affair, but he doesn’t forget Marina, checking in to see how the fallout of her relationship with Neil has affected her. Not surprisingly, she is still haunted by him.

Known mostly for mainstream Hollywood films like Mean Girls (2004) and Sherlock Holmes (2009), it is interesting to see Rachel McAdams cast in such an overtly artsy film like To the Wonder. She’s well-cast as an earthy woman trying to keep her horse ranch. Her character is a striking contrast to the more ethereal Marina. McAdams is a good fit for Malick’s cinematic world.

Malick takes more artistic risks than any other living American filmmaker, following his own unique thematic preoccupations and repeating visual motifs to the point of coming the closest to self-parody with To the Wonder than ever before, but his actors buy into his cinematic vision so completely that their commitment to it helps legitimize what he’s trying to do.

This film is an incredible exploration into the nature of relationships as Malick wrestles with the notion of how one can fail while another thrives. Why is that? Is it timing? Chemistry? To the Wonder seems to suggest that there is also a certain alchemy, an unquantifiable element that draws people to one another and also keeps them together. Some people can make it work and some can’t for any number of reasons. Relationships take hard work and Malick understands that and conveys it better than most filmmakers. It’s almost cliché to say that To the Wonder isn’t for everyone and at this point in his career it looks like Malick isn’t going to change his approach to storytelling any time soon. He is more interested in making cinematic tone poems rather than traditional linear narratives and it’s great to see someone putting themselves out there like he does with every film.