THE CASTLE OF PURITY

Director: Arturo Ripstein

Country: Mexico

Year: 1972

Duration: 110 min

Languages: Spanish / subtitled in English

Original name: El castillo de la pureza

Category: , ,

Starting around 1941, the one-armed rat poison manufacturer Rafael Pérez Hernández kept his family of finally seven (six surviving children plus his wife) captive inside a fortress-like edifice on the Norte-section of Mexico City’s seemingly endless Avenida de los Insurgentes. Only in 1959, a note thrown out of the house by one of the children got picked up and delivered to the police. When Pérez Hernández was asked for an explanation, he said (per an article in Time, August 10th, 1959): “I am a freethinker. What can the outside world offer my family? Prostitution, crime, drunkenness, rock ‘n’ roll and the blasted television. No señor, none of that for my family.”

So, yes, all the outrageous happenings you see in The Castle of Purity are based on facts, with Ripstein taking great pains to stress the eerie ordinariness of the family’s daily life, with its rituals just like what’s going on behind those walls and yet twisted due to the surroundings, conditions. To stress the situation’s absurdity, Ripstein sometimes sets his scenes up with a slight theatrical touch, as if showing a stage, only to then zoom onto a detail, or a gesture, to stress the situation’s extra/ordinariness. With The Castle of Purity, Ripstein dives for the first of many times into a mood one could describe as a uniquely Mexican morbidity – a casual violence tinged with puzzling tenderness and disturbing humor.

Olaf Möller