Lauded Mexican director Arturo Ripstein is widely held to be the most innovative and talented auteur currently at work in his country. With a long list of credits to his name that delve unflinchingly into the gritty intricacies of humanity, often introducing a new take on genre conventions, he got his illustrious start as the assistant director on the set of Luis Bunuel`s EXTERMINATING ANGEL. This stylistic, intentionally stagy melodrama is set in 1940s Vera Cruz, largely in the Cafe Ofilia; it follows a complacent waiter, Nacho (Luis Felipe Tovar, SUCH IS LIFE), an indigenous Mexican who suffers the abuse of the cafe`s manager--who boasts loudly of his Spanish origins--by day, and passes his nights with his extensive porn collection. He encounters a beautiful, sexually rapacious, and politically radical prostitute named Lola (Ariadna Gil, CAMERA OBSCURA), and falls unconditionally in love with the amoral opium addict. They enter into a sadomasochistic but non-physical relationship; he fetishizes her lace glove while she dreams of her true love, a masked wrestler named Gardenia. Nacho finally begins to entertain fantasies of killing Spanish dictator Franco, thus winning Lola`s heart once and for all.
