There was an informative piece in the February 28 edition of the Daily Mail Online about dwarfism in humans. A 33-year-old Australian mother of one, Journee Casabuena, was quoted complaining about cluelessness in non-dwarves and "her fight for a better future for her son." Twelve color photographs accompany the article, which also contains words. The young mother warns against the use of the term midget , which she says "was used in the circus-freak era. So when you call us a midget you are saying, 'You're a freak.'" Well, freaks, if you want to watch some midgets, Bleak Street opens at the Opera Plaza this Friday, March 11.
On June 29, 2009, the unbreathing bodies of twin dwarf brothers were found lying side-by-side naked in a cheap hotel room not far from the Arena Mexico, where they were known to wrestling fans as La Parkita (Little Death) and Espectrito (Little Ghost). Obsessive professionals, they never removed their scary Mexican wrestling masks. At least not when anybody else was around. Picture the scene. There was no violence, only eternal rest. They were 35 years old, in prime condition. They had been administered prescription eye-drops in their victory drinks after a big match.
Now Alberto and Alejandro Jimenez are resurrected cinema verite style via the realistically twisted imagination of Mexican director Arturo Ripstein. No color, only startling black-and-white tableaux, composed and shot by director of photography Alejandro Cantu as if to illustrate the word "haunting." The takes are long, longer, longest. The pace is like breathing. A requiem with a gleam in its eye. There's only one way this movie is going to go: downhill for all concerned, and we might as well enjoy the ride. The monochrome picks out every sad, sordid visual detail of life in the gritty underworld where uncanny monsters have pride of place, even as the screenplay by Paz Alicia Garciadiego wavers between lament and farce.
The tale of the tragic twins is forever joined to that of their hapless murderers. We spend a lot of time watching two old hookers trying to catch a break in a series of sparely furnished rooms, brick-paved streets, seedy staircases. Poverty hasn't looked this good since the heyday of the post-war Italian Neorealists. Objects are carefully selected and placed, no clutter, in natural light when possible. The two anti-heroines, Adela and Dora, are the unlikeliest successors to Thelma and Louise, or Lucy and Ethel, unthinkable in a Hollywood film. Ravaged beauty, shameless confidence trickery, the art of survival.
Reviewers haven't been kind to Bleak Street, and why should they? The movie, for all its drop-dead art direction, attention to grim, grimy, grotesque detail, and inherent can't-look-away appeal, is a bit too much like real life to appeal to minds saturated with quick-cut shoot-em-ups, crash-em-ups, and blow-em-ups. Even the dwarves, with all their built-in circus-freak potential, are imbued with the dignity of their profession. We are forced to contemplate them as an integral part of the human puzzle. Their mother is far weirder than they are, but her weirdness fits right in with theirs, and they all end up looking normal.
Journee Casabuena will not, however, be happy with the subtitling, which is littered with "midget this" and "midget that" when the spoken Spanish could go either way. And she might not consider the subject matter uplifting. Why do the brothers choose to spend their hard-won money on whores as old as their mother? Why do they decide to double-down in a single hotel room? As in the ring, so in bed. Judging by early shots of the diminutive duo throwing each other down with ease and abandon in the arena, their last night in the arms of their mothers-for-hire must have been something big.