Betrayed by Buñuel
“overdone, like an
El Greco painting”
—Manuel Puig on
Arturo Ripstein’s film
Place With No Limits
Luis Buñuel says somewhere
that rarely is film and poetry combined in such a way as to do what has to be
done—such as what Buñuel did with his shocking Un chien andalou and chilling
Los Olvidados (1950).
I fell in love with
Buñuel’s handsome young hoodlum El Jaibo in Los Olvidados—played by moody,
sullen Roberto Cobo.
And then, I saw Cobo in
drag in Hell Without Limits (El lugar sin lĂmites) in 1978
almost 30 years later—and I felt strangely, exquisitely betrayed by the Mexican
stud doing drag.
Like Manuel Puig toying facetiously with the idea of being
betrayed by Rita Hayward in his novel—later visiting her toward the end in her
last stages of Alzheimer’s—I felt the same way seeing Roberto Cobo doing drag
in a run-down whorehouse in rural Chile.
How could Roberto Cobo so butchy and handsome in Los
Olvidados—do a believable, sympathetic queen to a wider transvestite-loving
audience? Cobo plays La Manuela in love with Pancho—a resentful young truck
driver who she seduces in her brothel in EstaciĂłn El Olivo.
The screenplay that Puig did for Ripstein portrays the
angry, insecure stud Pancho—in a role I thought that surely would’ve been played
by Cobo.
But instead, Gonzalo Vega plays the dumb, gullible, sexy
stud Pancho—while Cobo gives La Manuel all the human depth that the author JosĂ©
Donoso did with his transvestite novel El lugar sin lĂmites (Hell Has No
Limits).
The problem was that Ripstein saw Donoso’s drag treatment as
much too nuanced about machismo and sexual underdogs. He thought that Puig’s
screenplay was trying to make La Manuel too exaggerated and Pancho too
super-macho.
Puig, on the other hand, thought Ripstein’s camera direction
was trying to reflect an inner drag life that tended toward “artsy” static
tedium. Too full of psychological realism and expressionistic touches. Mirrors,
dark interiors—it was much too oppressive for the joy of actually doing
authentic drag tangos.
Puig had a bitch fight with Ripstein over the film’s
climax—which had an ambiguous ending with the fate of La Manuel's drag seduction
of Pancho. Ripstein replaced Puig with JosĂ© Emilio Pacheco—who had La Manuel
brutally killed by Pancho suffering from so-called “homosexual panic” which was
simply too much for Puig.
Both Puig and Ripstein accused each other of overdoing
Cobo’s drag role as La Manuel—Puig supposedly being much too gay and Ripstein
supposedly being much too straight.
Later Puig had the same concerns about William Hurt’s
interpretation of Molina in The Kiss of the Spider Woman.
But even Ripstein, though, admitted that the best scene in
Hell Without Limits—was the fatal dance that poor Manuela, decked out in a red
feathery flamenco dress outlining his bony male buttocks, does for Pancho.