Years ago, brothel madame La Japonesa made a bet with the small town’s mayor and main landowner, Don Alejo: that she could seduce her transvestite sex worker La Manuela into bedding and impregnating her. She won and made La Manuela the place’s co-owner. By now, their daughter, La Japonesita, runs the brothel with her male mother – and is in love with the same man as she is: Pancho, a trucker with a nasty, violent streak…
The Place without Limits is a milestone in Mexican cinema’s representation of non-heterosexual desire: for the first time, psychologically complex gay characters were put at the centre of a fiction feature for general release. Ripstein went for a sparse, stripped-down visual style and a calm pacing that makes the story’s tragedy seep into the viewer – one isn’t hit with the horror of the situation, but at some point suddenly finds oneself in the midst of a deranged and yet totally ordinary hell of masculinity at its most malignant. Of significance in this context is also the casting of Fernando Soler as Don Alejo, as he’s one of classical Mexican cinema’s epitomaí of bourgeois dignity – a gravitas he brazenly questions here in one of his very last roles. Finally, it’s worth noting that The Place without Limits can also be understood as an acidic critique of a local genre particular to the period: the fichera, erotic comedies which often poked fun at gay characters.
Olaf Möller