Self-delusion is a grotesque thing in Arturo Ripstein’s mordantly funny and disturbing Deep Crimson. This 1996 melodrama transposes the story of the “Lonely Hearts” killers—the basis for The Honeymoon Killers—from late-1940s America to the sparse, weatherworn landscapes of northern Mexico. Ripstein and screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego present their murderous couple as self-loathing, delusional, and driven by a destructive love that threatens to swallow them whole. While Deep Crimson mines the couple’s desperation for dark comedy, it’s the film’s profound empathy that makes it such a singularly beguiling and thorny portrait of amour fou.
Ripstein trades the gritty black-and-white documentary realism of The Honeymoon Killers for a Sirkian blend of vibrant colors and big, sweeping emotions, intensifying both the passion and debilitating insecurities that plague Nicolas (Daniel Giménez Cacho) and Coral (Regina Orozco). Where Nicolas is excessively neurotic about his baldness, protecting the secret of his toupee with the scrupulousness of a wartime spy, Carol is all too despondent about her weight and perpetual bad breath. When the two are together, they fully embrace one another’s flaws, seeing the other not as they are but as their imagined romantic ideal.
Unsurprisingly, the two are deceitful upon first meeting, with Coral lying about her weight and trying to hide evidence of her two children and Nicolas putting on a fake Spanish accent (he later steals money from her after seducing her). Amusingly enough, it’s these very deceptions that draw the two toward one another, each needing the other to sustain the illusions they’ve created of themselves. The murders they commit, after Nicolas seduces other women only to rob them, are extensions of this illusion, as Nicolas sees himself as helping terminally lonely women and Coral sees the violence as the means through which she can keep Nicolas all to herself.
Throughout Deep Crimson, the purity and intensity of Nicolas and Coral’s love for one another is repeatedly undermined by the former’s violent outbursts stemming from his insecurity and the latter’s jealousy. As the film unfolds, it’s as if the illusory visions they have of one another are constantly cracking. Coral sees Nicolas as her Charles Boyer and he sees her as something of a guardian angel, yet their misdeeds cause their impulsive, and sometimes repulsive, instincts to take charge, revealing the spiritual and psychological ugliness that lurks within them.
When Coral becomes jealous over Nicolas’s kindness to their final victim, as well as to her young child, she blames him for forcing her to run off with him. Meanwhile, Nicolas berates her any time she’s remotely critical of him. Ripstein presents the push-pull nature of their relationship as part of a twisted lovers’ game in which the pathetic humorousness of their fumbling attempts at a life of crime are infused with both the macabre and the transcendent. There’s a perverse beauty in their unflappable commitment to one another, and Deep Crimson never shies away from that, rendering their love story as a queasy amalgam of the tragic, the despicable, and the pitiful. Perhaps needless to say, then, Deep Crimson is a very human film.
Image/Sound
The new 4K restoration of Deep Crimson’s extended director’s cut looks great. The lack of DolbyVision or HDR will disappoint some viewers, but the reds (found in virtually every shot of the film) are quite vibrant, and the range of the other colors that comprise the palette (mostly autumnal or earthy hues) is still fairly strong. Image sharpness and detail is fantastic throughout, allowing for the fullest appreciation of the film’s often scuzzy settings. The audio features clean dialogue and some nicely immersive effects from the 2.0 surround mix.
Extras
In the first of two new interviews, Arturo Ripstein talks about his fascination with physical and emotional sordidness and the lasting impact of his time on the set of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and collaborating with Gabriel García Márquez. In her interview, Ripstein’s wife and creative partner Paz Alicia Garciadiego discusses writing the film’s screenplay. In a 2017 panel discussion from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the pair talks about their unique collaborative process and go into greater depth about the adaptation process. Rounding out the package is an introduction by Ari Aster, who praises the film’s gallows humor, and a foldout poster with an essay by film scholar Haden Guest, who provides a nice overview of Ripstein’s career and the main themes of Deep Crimson.
Overall
Arturo Ripstein’s transfixing tale of deception, obsession, and desperation from 1966 receives a gorgeous new transfer courtesy of the Criterion Collection.
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