Perdita Durango is not a film recommended to sensitive people, but it is definitely recommended to all film lovers who appreciate authentic creative vision, energy and passion
The prematurely deceased James Gandolfini played a small, but certainly a memorable role of Willie Dumas Woody, in the macabre action thriller romance Perdita Durango directed by the bizarre-prone Alex de la Iglesia. The film won two Goya awards and is the adaptation of the novel "59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango" by the American writer (Wild at Heart) and screenwriter Barry Gifford (Lost road), whose novels have often been made into films. Gandolfini interprets the ambitious agent of the Narcotics Department who is chasing the anti-heroine, played by Rosie Perez, across the US-Mexican border. The rough and extremely violent outlaw together with the maniacal criminal and murderer Romeo Dolorosa, who practices black magic, (interpreted by Javier Bardem with great energy and mannerisms), is leaving behind a trail of blood. Their sins include kidnapping of a teenager and his girlfriend and smuggling a truck shipment of human embryos to Las Vegas for research in the cosmetics industry. It is a kind of a spin-off of Gifford's novel Wild at Heart that brilliantly adapted for film by David Lynch in which Perdita Durango, played by Isabella Rossellini, was merely a secondary character who appeared before the end of the film. De la Iglesia's film is an adaptation of the third of seven of Gifford's novels that focus on the same group of characters.
Pedro Almodóvar’s former protégé, de la Iglesia conceived the whole as an insane road film overloaded with a couple of psychopathic killers as protagonists in bizarre situations. It is a macabre grotesque abundant with explicit violence and disgust, involving eating a human heart in a Santeria black magic ritual. It is an anarchic, subversive and satirical film whose satirical stings are directed towards the narrow-minded and basically suspect American middle class, as well as a work whose dark humour further emphasises the absurdity and misanthropy. The always temperamental Rosie Perez created probably the best role in her career. Neverheless,the entire film is dominated by the at the time internationally unknown Spanish actor Javier Bardem. He is suggestive and energetic and with the help of almost literally explosive directing by de la Iglesia, he managed to make the character of Romeo Dolorosa acceptable and even nice, despite his aggressiveness and basic unacceptability. Perdita Durango is not a film recommended to sensitive people, but it is definitely recommended to all film lovers who appreciate authentic creative vision, energy and passion. (Josip Grozdanić)