Billed as ‘una ironía clásica’ and based on a short story by Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, this movie plays like a folk tale with the devil gallivanting through the details.
Dionisio Pinzón (Ernesto Gómez Cruz), a simple and somewhat eccentric poor peasant, lives with his ailing, elderly mother (Socorro Avelar) and works as a town crier and odd jobs man in a small Mexican town that signs indicate to be Palenque in Chiapas.
Dionisio finds luck in the person of Bernarda ‘La Caponera’ Cutiño (Blanca Guerra), a singer with a travelling band. He goes from rags to riches to rags again, and Bernardita, ‘La Pinzonsita’ (Zaide Silvia Gutierrez), the daughter he has with La Caponera, follows in her mother’s footsteps.
The film opens with Dionisio and his mother asleep on the dirt floor of a one-room dwelling, along two sides of an unoccupied bed in a space lit by the tiny blinking red lights of a large wreath with a ribbon that says ‘Merry Christmas’ in English.
A cockcrow awakes Dionisio. He rises, gargles, spits, then gives several full-throated warbles at himself in a small piece of mirror, which awakens his mother. After she gets up, he goes into the street, blows a whistle, beats a drum, steps up on a platform the size of a milk crate, and starts crying various public announcements. But rather than to suspect that I am experiencing the work of a Mexican David Lynch (Luis Buñuel was Ripstein’s mentor), in an odd way all of this falls into place, as though I am seeing everyday occurrences so ordinary that they barely rate mention.
As master of ceremonies at a cockfight, Dionisio saves a fancy fighting cock injured in a fight and given up for dead. He takes the bird home stroking it lovingly and talking softly to it, and sets about nursing it back to health in the dirt yard in front of his house. At the same time, his ailing mother, thrashing about inside the house, dies.
Dionisio seems more concerned about giving his mother a proper burial than he was about her condition when she was alive, but gets this taken care of; his recovered cock wins the first of a series of fights that begin to lead him to the ‘realm of fortune.’
The cockfighting scenes look genuine. The sets and crowds look like live entertainment at village fairs that seem to be mainly for adult males—culturally, and not necessarily because of the content. The fairs feature carnival rides, prize cockfighting in small arenas surrounded by cheering and wagering aficionados, and variety acts staged on the beds of small trucks, such as comedy skits and music.
La Caponera is one of the truck bed performers, accompanied by a mariachi band, alone on a small stage framed by a neon proscenium. She also performs offstage in the background while the cockfights take place. Dionisio falls in love with her, as do many men, because she is young, beautiful, and sings folk songs with a lovely voice.
Her appearance in the story coincides with the beginning of Dionisio’s long run of luck. After he becomes prosperous, she gives herself to him—though it is not clear why a beautiful young cantante with many admirers would favor a middle-aged, unsophisticated rustic with a bound hand who is closer to animals than people.
Eventually, Dionisio, Bernarda and their daughter Bernardita end up in an enormous rococo mansion in the middle of nowhere, filled with faux classical sculpture and art, which looks like a dusty, moth-eaten Mexican Addams family house. The central feature is the enormous baize-covered poker table where Dionisio won the house from his mentor, and where he will lose it.
In the end, Bernarda’s true golden egg is the adult Bernardita singing her mother’s songs in a new day as La Pinzona. The quirky but catchy ‘Las roses de mis rosales/de los colores del mar’ (The roses of my rosebushes/of the color of the sea) was going through my head long afterwards—like the rest of this curious and interesting movie.
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