Deep Crimson · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A balding man lifts his hair off its stand and fits it to his head. He does it slowly, the way you handle something borrowed from a church. Nicolás Estrella is Spanish, past his prime, working provincial Mexico through the matrimonial ads, and he is convinced he resembles Charles Boyer. The toupee is the hinge between the man he is and the man he signs his letters as. Coral Fabre, the nurse who answers one of them, is heavy, blunt, and about to abandon two children without a backward glance. She looks at him and agrees to see Boyer. That agreement is the love story. The corpses follow from it.

Gilles Deleuze put a whole category of cinema between the close-up and the chase, and it is the one Deep Crimson lives in. He called it the impulse-image, and its world has two floors. Upstairs is the derived milieu, the concrete respectable setting, which here is the provincial widow's parlour: doilies, devotional prints, dark wood, a radio always on. Downstairs is the originary world, which no camera films directly and every good naturalist film makes you feel, a level with no persons and no property on it, only appetites and the things they want. The impulse-image is what happens when a drive comes up through the floorboards and starts taking. Deleuze built the concept largely out of Buñuel, which is a lucky accident, since Ripstein watched Buñuel work on The Exterminating Angel as a teenager and spent thirty years arguing with him.

Why reach for that vocabulary instead of just calling Coral disturbed? Because Paz Alicia Garciadiego's screenplay has removed every instrument you would need to diagnose her. No scene of origin, no childhood, no trauma handed over as the key. Coral leaves her children and the film declines to rule on it. What you get is symptom with no cause attached: behaviour that plainly belongs to a drive, presented without explanation, which is the contract Buñuel kept in Ensayo de un crimen, where a music box cues each murder fantasy and the killer's interior is never opened. Regina Orozco, an opera singer with almost no screen history, plays Coral's appetite — for food, for Nicolás, for possession — as a physical fact rather than a condition. That is the impulse-image's whole demand on an actor, and she meets it without once asking to be forgiven.

Drives need objects. Deleuze's naturalism is full of them: the fetish, a piece torn off the world and loaded with the entire force of a hunger. Nicolás's toupee is one of the great examples in any film, handled with the tenderness owed a relic and the terror owed evidence. The fan magazines are another. Ripstein takes the method straight from Buñuel's Él, where the needle and thread and the locked bedroom carry the argument the man will never say out loud. Let the prop speak and you never have to write the confession scene.

Now the harder concept, the one that makes the murders legible. Deleuze's crystal-image is what happens when an actual thing and a virtual image of it start exchanging places until you cannot say which came first. The standard case is a mirror. Coral and Nicolás are each other's mirror: he is Boyer in her eyes, she is beloved in his, and neither reflection survives contact with anyone else. The virtual half is not even private. It was issued to them by the culture, by film-star iconography and by the boleros coming out of every radio in the film. They speak in the register of radio melodrama because they have no other language for what they feel. Ripstein reroutes that device from the cabaretera pictures of the 1940s, Aventurera and its kind, where the song on the bandstand says what the scene withholds. Here the song is not commentary. It is the characters' actual vocabulary, playing in the room where the widow will die. And the crystal seals: no outside to it, no third party admitted. That is the atrocity's mechanism. Coral will not let Nicolás sleep with the women he marries, so the women have to go.

Which is why the killings happen at the level of manners. The couple's cover story is that Coral is his sister, so the film keeps returning to a table with three people at it, two of them lying, one being courted while the liar's real wife watches from four feet away. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, would call that arrangement a gest: a posture that lays bare a social relation with nobody having to explain it. Ripstein stages these as ordinary domestic scenes and lets the horror come up out of the etiquette.

The film advances by accumulation. Rafael Castanedo cuts architecturally, blocks laid end to end with enormous gaps between them, so that a marriage or a journey or a burial can happen in an ellipsis. New widow, new town, new grave. Deleuze calls this shape the line of slope, the irreversible descent every impulse-image eventually confesses to, and here the structure is the compulsion rather than a container for it. The chassis is Buñuel again, the picaresque of Nazarín, a pair moving through self-contained provincial episodes that resolve nothing. Suspense disappears early because the pattern never varies. Dread takes its place.

Then the camera, which is Ripstein's real invention. Guillermo Granillo shoots in long gliding takes that run close to the physical limit of a 35mm magazine, and the film finds its next piece of information by moving rather than by cutting. The arc swings and there is already a third person in the room. Deleuze's name for a shot working this way is the mobile section: movement that registers a change in the whole, not just travel across a space. The moral consequence is severe. When the violence comes, and it comes repeatedly, against women and once against a child, the camera neither cuts away nor presses in. It holds its distance, sometimes with the killing half-blocked by furniture, letting the act take the time it would actually take, in the same shot as the ordinary business around it. André Bazin argued that the cut is where a director tells you what to feel, and that some realities are falsified the instant you break them into shots. Ripstein's position is the same, and colder: a cut here would be the greater dishonesty. The precedent is Gun Crazy, Joseph H. Lewis filming the Hampton robbery in one unbroken take from the back seat so the crime and the couple's shared enclosure cannot be pulled apart. Ripstein extends that principle to a whole film. The camera will not cut these two apart.

Notice what he does not do with all the lying. Nicolás forges his hair, his name, his resemblance, his sister. Deleuze's forger is usually the doorway into a different cinema altogether, one where the narration itself starts falsifying and truth goes undecidable. Ripstein keeps the forgery inside the frame. The characters lie constantly; the camera never does. What makes those dinner scenes unbearable is that we hold the truth the entire time and can only sit there with it. Charles Laughton's widow-courting preacher in The Night of the Hunter is the model for playing a confidence man at full theatrical scale without a wink, and Ripstein removes the audience's escape hatch too.

So what did the film do? Before it, the long take mostly carried austerity and judgment held in reserve. Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers had already filmed this exact case, the Fernandez–Beck murders of the late 1940s, in cold black-and-white at clinical distance, and it is the version Ripstein and Garciadiego were answering. Their answer was warmth. They moved the file to provincial Mexico, took melodrama with total literalness, refused pastiche and refused camp, and proved that duration could serve melodramatic intensity rather than contemplative remove: a camera can decline to cut out of tenderness for two people rather than judgment of them. The long takes and moral austerity of Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante and Michel Franco run out of that demonstration. So does the now-settled sense that the lonely-hearts file is a love story, which was Garciadiego's reading first.

Watch the radios next time. They are in nearly every room, playing somebody else's idea of love, and the two people about to commit murder are singing along in their heads. At the end they are shot in open country and left where they fall, with the flatness of paperwork. The open question is whether the camera's refusal to look away is mercy or the last cruelty in a film full of them. Nobody has settled it. Ripstein's answer is that he stays.