The sublime, visual poeticness of `El Coronel no tiene quién le escriba' (qv), without any doubt one of the most beautiful films in Spanish from either side of the Atlantic, used beautiful photography, music and two excellent actors to build up an exquisitely atmospheric film evoking sincere pathos, such that the impact is tenderly psychological.
With `Así es la Vida' all that has gone; the subtleties of `El Coronel no tiene quién le escriba' (Gabriel García Marquez) are thrown out in favour of double-handed axe blows which obviate the outcome way before you get there. It seems as if Arturo Ripstein sought to bombard the spectator into oblivion with a pathologically overwrought story reaching extremes of visual violence which are not really justified. In this, his wife, Paz Alicia Garciadiego, is to blame. Her careful adaptation of Gabriel García Marquez's short novel, here becomes a `machaconic' bombast of disproportionate savagery. The film kills itself from its own blunt heavy-handedness, such that one tends to think that Mrs. Garciadiego-Ripstein was hell-bent on vomiting up her own masochistic `macho' feelings, rather than telling the story in a more heart-felt way: the result on the viewer may well have been just as powerful, without resorting to such exaggerated extremes.
Neither the presence of Tovar nor Yáñez lend much to the proceedings, unfortunately: the film derails around them. Added to that is the frustration of trying to work out a very marked Mexican accent which often left me half-guessing some of the dialogues. I do not usually have any difficulty with the regional varieties of Spanish on the American side of the Atlantic, but in this film, the going was definitely `muy chingadera'.
I hope that a far better conclusion can be made after seeing the next Ripstein-Garciadiego film `La Virgen de la Lujuria' with Ariadna Gil and Juan Diego. If not, I can only suggest that Ripstein change scriptwriter, if not wife
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