Bleak Street

(La calle de la amargura, Arturo Ripstein, Mexico/Spain 2015, 99 min., DCP, Spanish w/subtitles)

Rochester Premiere. In the early morning hours, two elderly prostitutes go back to their hovels. They are not tired from working; they are tired of not working. One has problems at home with her teenage daughter and cross-dressing husband. The other lives with her invalid mother and loneliness. But that night, they have a date to celebrate the victory in the ring of two wrestlers, twin little people wearing masks. At the hourly hotel, in order to rob the men of their earnings, they drug them with eye drops.

“A lunatic swirl into the hopes, kinks, and day-to-day hustle of a handful of Mexico

City characters so colorful, the pic’s black-and-white cinematography merely amplifies their eccentricities. Between its pint-sized pugilists, cross-dressing philanderers and desperate old whores, this carnivalesque group portrait might easily be mistaken for some lost Fellini project, were it not for the twist that this phantasmagoric true-crimer wasn’t dreamed up by its director . . . but pulled from the pages of the local newspaper.” – Variety