Screen Gems
Time to Die
More than 50 years have passed since Arturo Ripstein completed his debut feature Time to Die. Belatedly, this work — one of the unsung masterpieces of modern Mexican cinema — is finally receiving wide distribution in the United States, as a sharp new 2K restoration makes the rounds, undertaken by Film Movement and built up from an original 35-mm print.
Ripstein stands as one of Mexico’s most revered filmmakers, probably best known for his twisted 1996 tale of love and murder, Deep Crimson, which was inspired by the same black comic saga behind Leonard Kastle’s 1970 cult classic The Honeymoon
Killers. Ripstein was in his early twenties when he completed Time to Die in 1966. Fresh from working as an assistant to the expatriate Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel on The Exterminating Angel, Ripstein tapped many of Buñuel’s most trustworthy crew members to help with this project. Canadian Alex Phillips served as cinematographer and the leading actress, Marga López, had just completed her appearance in Buñuel’s Nazarin.
In addition to plucking talents from Buñuel’s crack team, Ripstein also demonstrated amazing foresight by persuading two of Latin America’s most towering literary geniuses to lend a hand. This lean Western centers on a tale of revenge that was first envisioned by Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel Prize winner. Just to seal its pedigree, Ripstein also asked author Carlos Fuentes to rework the dialogue and give it a more Mexican flavor. Thus, this was not only Ripstein’s debut, but also Márquez’s first screenplay.
The story: An elderly ranch hand, Juan Sáyago (Jorge Martínez de Hoyos), returns to his village after serving 18 years in prison for gunning down one of the town’s stalwart residents. Sáyago has not only done his time, but we learn he’s actually quite a docile man, prone to knitting. He probably committed the shooting in a fair duel that he was goaded into entering. The townsfolk know exactly what happened and are ready to forgive and forget, but the Trueba brothers (Alfredo Leal and Enrique Rocha), sons of the dead man, have vowed to take their revenge.
Time to Die follows the give and take as Sáyago seeks to rebuild his life, only to have the Trueba boys dog him every step of the way, provoking him to violence. Especially painful are his overtures to his former girlfriend (played by López), herself now a widow raising a fatherless son. She tries to warn off the young woman engaged to one of Sáyago’s tormentors, telling her it’s better to love a living coward than a brash, dead fool.
Admirers of vintage Westerns like The Searchers will recognize this as a kindred story, every bit as elemental and, fundamentally, fateful. Ripstein set the film in the vicinity of Pátzcuaro, a dusty, windblown expanse to the west of Mexico City, near the same locations used as backdrops in the 1958 Gregory Peck Western The Bravados.
The bleak, eerie landscape adds to the building sense of dread, exemplified by Sáyago’s old homestead, perhaps once a comfortable hideaway, but now strewn with rubble and weeds. The film moves swiftly and inexorably toward its tragic conclusion. There are some minor glitches — Fuentes’ dialogue is overly flowery — but otherwise, Time to Die is tight, lean, and remains quite a powerful drama. — Jon Bowman