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).

DVD of the Week: Mystery Train: Criterion Collection

Jim Jarmusch is a filmmaker who has always been interested in outsiders, people who live on the fringes of mainstream society. His first three films took a look at America through the eyes of a foreigner. With Stranger than Paradise (1984), a young Hungarian woman visits her hipster cousin in New York City. Down by Law (1986) follows the misadventures of three men who escape a Louisiana prison, one of whom is an Italian tourist that hardly speaks English. Finally, there is Mystery Train (1989), three different stories that take place simultaneously in the same in the run-down hotel in Memphis. Each story prominently features people from other countries like Japan, Italy and England, and how they react to a city steeped in rich, musical history with the ghost of the King, Elvis Presley himself, present in one form or another.


In the first story, “Far from Yokohama,” see two teenager Japanese tourists (Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh) visit Memphis to take a tour of Graceland and the legendary Sun Studios where Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and so many others recorded numerous hit records. She is a big fan of the King but he digs Carl Perkins. The key to this segment is miscommunication. The couple don’t get much out of the Sun Studio tour because their guide talks too fast and they don’t understand English all that well, but they do care about each other and in the end that’s enough. There are all kinds of atmospheric tracking shots of the Japanese couple walking through the empty streets of Memphis. They decide to stay in a slightly run-down hotel operated by man played by none other than Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Once the couple gets situated, there’s a funny bit where the girl goes through a scrapbook filled with famous people and landmarks that resemble Elvis.

The next story, entitled “A Ghost,” concerns a woman (Nicoletta Braschi) from Italy who has arrived in Memphis to take her deceased husband back home. There is a problem with her flight and she has to stay the night. After being hit on by a creepy guy (Tom Noonan) in a restaurant, she takes refuge in the nearby hotel where she meets a woman (Elizabeth Bracco) unable to afford a night there. The two women decide to share a room. In a memorable scene after retiring for the evening, the Italian woman is visited by the spirit of Elvis in what is a touchingly poignant and yet also whimsical moment.

Finally, “Lost in Space” features a trio of inept knuckleheads in the film’s funniest story. Johnny (Joe Strummer) is a cranky Englishman recently fired from his job. After drunkenly waving a gun around in a bar, his friend Will (Rick Aviles) and his brother-in-law Charlie (Steve Buscemi) arrive to diffuse the situation. After Johnny robs a liquor store, he and his friends hide out in the hotel. Charlie and Will try to calm down the mercurial Johnny and keep him under control but it’s not easy. There’s a lot of fun to be had watching Joe Strummer and Steve Buscemi bounce off the walls of the small hotel room they hold up in.

Mystery Train is a fascinating snapshot of Memphis through the eyes of foreigners and the disenfranchised. The stories in this film run the gamut from romantic to touching to amusing but all with a humanistic streak running through them. Jarmusch would follow this film with Night on Earth (1991) which would adhere to the same structure but on a much more ambitious level.

Special Features:

There is a “Q&A with Jim.” As he has done for past Criterion editions of his films, Jarmusch answers questions submitted by fans in lieu of an audio commentary. They are by no means restricted to the film but the bulk of them do pertain to it. Jarmusch confirms that Tom Waits’ D.J. heard in the film is in fact the same character he played in Down by Law. He talks about how he worked with the Japanese actors and the origins of their segment title. He also talks about his favourite Elvis era and addresses the barren and bleak look of Memphis in the film.

“I Put a Spell on Me” features excerpts from a 2001 documentary on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Jarmusch is interviewed and talks about when he first heard Jay’s signature song, “I Put a Spell on You,” how he used it in Stranger than Paradise and then cast him in Mystery Train. Jay talks about working on the film and shares some amusing anecdotes on this fantastic extra.

“Memphis Tour” revisits many of the locations used in the film. We get a brief history of each location and what happened to it since filming. The restaurant used is the oldest in the city. Unfortunately, the hotel featured so prominently in the film was torn down a year after it was made. This is a fascinating extra that takes a look at how these locales have changed over the years.

“Polaroids” features snapshots taken on location during filming.

Finally, there is a gallery of behind-the-scenes images from a photo book published at the time of the film’s release.