L'Étrange Festival - XXIIIrd edition - September 6 - 17 2017

Dance with the Devil

Perdita Durango - 1997 - Color - 126 mn Original version with French subtitles - USA, Mexico, Spain - Road movie

Direction
Álex de la Iglesia
Production
Pablo Barbachano, Fernando Bovaira, Andrés Vicente Gómez, Marco Gómez, Miguel Necoechea, Max Rosenberg
Screenplay
Barry Gifford, David Trueba, Álex de la Iglesia, Jorge Guerricaechevarría
Editing
Teresa Font
Photography
Flavio Martínez Labiano
Music by
Simon Boswell
With
Javier Bardem, Rosie Perez, Harley Cross, Aimee Graham, Screamin' Jay Hawkins

Presentation reserved to audience above 12

The adventures of psychotic couple Perdita Durango and Romeo Dolorosa, who kidnap a young teenage couple for a religious sacrifice, and then cross Mexico to go to Las Vegas.

When mischievous Álex de la Iglesia (The day of the beast, Balada Triste) adapts an unhinged thriller by Barry Gifford (whose world had previously been brought to the screen in David Lynch’s Sailor and Lula) with Javier Bardem (No Country for old men), Rosie Perez (Human Nature, Cartel) et James Gandolfini (The Sopranos), you can expect a rejoicing show. The result : a jarring and absurd Bonnie and Clyde on hot chili, quoting from Roger Waters as well as from Robert Aldrich. Masterly !

BiTS

Spaniard Alex De La Iglesia is the ideal representative of this synthesis capacity, as he already showed in his first film Accion Mutante, where he effortlessly mixed horror, social satire and punk comic books. In the midst of his extraordinarily diversified career, his Perdita Durango is a summit of cultural syncretism. Never released in French theaters, this adaptation of a Barry Gifford novel stands as a “sidequel” of Gifford’s Sailor and Lula and explores the origins of the secondary character previously played by Isabella Rossellini in the David Lynch movie.

For his first international english speaking production, De La Iglesia didn’t try to emulate his prestigious elder. Far from Rossellini’s static postures, Iglesias’s Perdita is embodied - one could even say possessed - by the very physical acting of dancer and choreographer Rosie Perez, seconded by Xavier Bardem’s (already) unhinged acting, in this electric road movie that cheerfully mixes black magic, sex, foetus trafficking, the “border thriller” genre (giving us the chance to appreciate James Gandolfini in a pre-Soprano part), Screaming Jay Hawkins’ diabolical mumbo jumbo, and the western movie Vera Cruz. An apparently fine mess, made coherent by the director’s taste for esperpento, the literary movement that considers Latin countries as extreme caricatures of Western countries. And this caricature never forgets to be formally elegant, and even emotional, even if these twisted emotions belong only to the author, who likes to compare himself to “a clown in a washing machine” : funny, energetic and always renewed.

Friday 15 September 2017 - 19:30 - Showroom 500 - Screening reserved to audience above 12 - Screening in partnership with BiTS

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