The Place Without Limits

This is an unusual film. Above all because it was made in Mexico and in 1978, at a time when Fassbinder was still shocking Europe with the amoral way in which he treated sexuality in his films. It seems to have exerted a strong influence on this Mexican film.

The work is interesting not only for the courage, for the time, to approach the gay theme, but above all for the approach of the psychological repression resulting from machismo.

This not only prevented homosexuals from assuming their sexual orientation, but also pushed them towards a path of violence, against themselves and against those who, by assuming their homosexuality, revived the demons of their repressed sexuality.

An amazing film.

Family honor, greed, machismo, homophobia, and the dreams of whores collide in a Mexican town. Rich, elderly Don Alejo is poised to sell the town for a profit, needing only to buy a whorehouse to own all the buildings and close the deal.

The themes of this film are quite interesting, and in someways ahead of their time. We have a very blunt look at homosexuality in 1978, and based on a book from 1966. And, in a way, it is something of a multi-cultural film because the author, José Donoso, wrote the book in Chile but was later a resident of Mexico, Spain and Iowa -- his personal papers are in the University of Iowa archives.

I am not sure if a good edition exists. The one I saw was a bit rough, and this is the sort of film that could really use a new audience and some love from Criterion.

What Arturo Ripstein likes to do is put his characters in small isolated places, where the public feels trapped. In this case, the claustrophobic environment is not only the town or the house where the plot evolves, it´s Mexican closed minds. Drama full of unforgettable moments. GOTTA SEE IT!!!

Unbelievably shoddy. Slow: Tells, not shows, with endless dialogue, much of it plot exposition of the past. Characters are caricatures, flat and two-dimensional. A flashback comes unannounced, indistinguishable from the present. The murder, when it arrives, has been broadcast from the beginning, robbing it of all suspense.

Director Ripstein tries too hard to be "transgressive," a bad boy. Film revels in grit and grime for the sake of grit and grime - it's too cult. His comparison to Marlowe's Faustus, made in the inscription at the beginning, is a stretch and pretentious, to say the least. The title derives from this.

I had seen other Arturo Ripstein films before this one: you can say Ripstein films are unusual in their scripts and some might say downright weird in the treatment of their themes, but they are always hypnotic to watch. Their plot is often, well, a train wreck: you feel the tension and you know nothing will end well.( Tennessee Williams plays function within a similar mix of explosive passions and imminent doom). Everything in a Ripstein film is baroque: dialogues, themes and colors. This movie is all that, and more, because it introduces us to a rich cast of characters in a restricted setting, and there are significant political undertones to the tale. But the most fascinating part of this film is of course this gentle transvestite who never once drops the pretense that he is a woman, in public or in private ( The actor who plays him/her is AMAZING, and remarkably believable against all odds.) I think it is a solid story -with a great soundtrack of old Mexican songs- that has a lot to say about machismo and the plight of women in a society that values only male "qualities".