Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Deep Crimson
1996 · Arturo Ripstein · Deep Crimson on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera glide instead of cut between rooms. (camera)
Ripstein and Granillo move the camera in long, continuous takes, circling and reframing to find new information rather than cutting to it, sometimes for minutes at a stretch.
Payoff: A scene's next detail arrives as a turn of the camera, not a cut, so nothing ever feels chosen for you. In the reading: the mobile section (plan). The reading calls this the mobile section: a moving shot that registers a change in the whole scene, not just a trip across a room.
Notice how Nicolás handles his toupee like an object of worship. (setting)
He lifts it off its stand and fits it slowly, the care of someone handling something borrowed from a church. Fan magazines get the same reverence elsewhere in the film.
Payoff: One small object carries his entire fear of being seen for what he actually is. In the reading: fetish. The reading calls the toupee a fetish: a single object loaded with the whole force of what a person wants and fears.
Notice how little actual red appears in this film. (light)
Granillo drains the image toward brown, ochre and dirty gold, like a photograph left in the sun too long, and rations the title's crimson.
Payoff: Because the color is rationed, you notice red the moment it appears.
Listen for the radio playing boleros in nearly every room. (sound)
Coral and Nicolás speak and behave in the register of the romantic songs constantly on the radio around them, borrowing a whole vocabulary of love from 1940s popular culture.
Payoff: Their entire idea of romance turns out to come from somewhere else, a song, not a feeling of their own.
Watch how the three of them are seated at dinner. (staging)
Nicolás introduces Coral as his sister so he can court a widow freely, and Ripstein stages these as ordinary domestic scenes, letting the tension come from manners, not confrontation.
Payoff: Nobody raises their voice, yet you can feel exactly how unbearable the arrangement is for the person watching.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the radios. Everyone in this film is singing along in their head to somebody else's idea of love.