El lugar sin limites (Arturo Ripstein, 1978)

Arturo Ripstein's early study of machismo through the experiences of an ostracized gay whore in a dying Mexican town is legendary for being a brave overt critique of a Mexican institution when few previously existed. But beyond this, the film is flawed and does not improve upon the effectiveness of the critique already implicit in such Mexican films as El Rapto (1954) or Soy puro mexicano (1942), or the playfullness in which Ripstein's mentor, Luis Bunuel approached the topic in Ensayo de un crimen (1955). Unlike these films, El lugar sin limites does not question machismo itself, rather see it from the perspective of those that exist outside of it. Instead of seeing men as enacting machismo, the film sees men as machismo. In turn, the film emphasizes and affirms that which it tries to criticize: machismo or not, those who are not men or not "bruto"like men orbit around those that give Mexican culture its "essential" identity. Ultimately, Ripstein choice to treat the film's theme of exploitation as a given dooms its characters to the reality and "lugar" they exist. To an extent it isn't machismo that is the problem, it is the unexamined need to co-depend and to exploit that gives the film its weak thrust. To put it in other words, it isn't about machismo, but about the need to feel dour for no good reason. This pseudo-critique (grand platitudes, short on subtlety and moral ambiguousness) is almost a hallmark of Ripstein, whose Profundo carmesi (1996) remakes Honeymoon Killers (1970) by removing the latter's trashiness that gave it the moral weight of a B-movie but the immediacy of a newsreel, and loading it with self-righteous moral judgements about the alienating doomed love that exist between two messed up characters. I guess one can say that he is the complete opposite of the Cuarons and del Toros of today, making seriously no-fun movies loaded with a social, moral, and ethical agenda. Either way, both extremes for the most part are unsatisfying, veering very far from the classical cinema of Mexico's Golden Age, the great artists of which balanced populism and ethics through the mastery of their craft and the greatness of their produced works. The lesser artists of today have to rely on message or bombast; the great artists of the Golden Age simply had to rely on the light and shadow their cameras capture.